Over at the Wall Street Journal, there’s a troubling story from Jonathan Weisman entitled, Deficit to Hit All-Time High.

The situation is so alarming that a scholar from a left-leaning think tank is alarmed:

Isabel Sawhill, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution, criticized the president’s goal – a deficit of 3% of GDP long after the recession has ended – saying it amounted to “defining deficits down.”

“The pay-go rules will make it more difficult for Congress to dig the hole deeper but won’t affect currently projected red ink; and the commission will likely be a paper tiger,” she wrote on Friday. “In short, these proposals will still leave us with unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see. It is depressing to discover that we can no longer even aspire to balance the budget once the recession is over.”

No matter how troubled our national finances, one cannot reasonably and honestly say that these problems began in the last year. When the previous federal administration abandoned a prudent policy of fiscal restraint, the path to even greater profligacy was made clear.

There’s a local version of this situation in small-town Whitewater, Wisconsin. Several so-called conservatives sitting on our common council, community development authority, or tech park board (sometimes the very same people serving on more than one) have developed a taste for spending tax money and issuing municipal debt for public projects.

They will point with pride to how much public money they’ve spent, asking sensible people to believe that if they’ve spent these sums – often millions – in tax dollars, the expenditure must, absolutely must, have been a wonderful idea.

Some of these same people undoubtedly decry the Obama Administration’s national policies while committing our town to a local version of the same. The rank hypocrisy of their approach is simultaneously disgraceful and laughable. The desire to fit in, go along, and abandon principle for the sake of a pat on the back is nearly irresistible to the weak-willed and weak-minded.

It takes nothing so extraordinary as the Sirens to tempt men of this needy ilk; they cast principle away for no more than the flattery of others as unreasonable and vain as they are.