Conservatives: We Must Break the Greek Cycle Now

When American politicians, especially establishment Republicans, want to criticize the level of spending, deficit and debt the federal government has, the cliché they use is, “We are about to become Greece,” or, “We are heading down the same path Greece took.”

To be charitable, this is typical of establishment politicians -- to participate in creating a crisis, and then self-righteously criticize and complain when it happens.

Many Greeks came to recognize that their present torment is the result of establishment politicians of the two main parties, New Democracy and PASOK, pandering to the politically popular idea of a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

By buying votes with government benefits, the Greek political class presided over years of corruption and waste that accompanied the creation of their welfare state, leaving the Greek citizens who bought into the idea of living the good life on borrowed money with a ruined economy and one of the heaviest debt burdens in the world.

The questions Greek voters had to decide in the election over the weekend were whether or not they would set aside the lavish welfare state they built on the model of wealthier European countries, such as Germany and France, and whether they trusted the establishment to finally clean-up the economic mess it created pandering to popular sentiment to keep itself in power.

The alternative was to buy into the promises of the radical left that doing more of what created the crisis would allow Greeks to live like they had before the curtain was pulled-back to reveal the economic and political lies the establishment had been perpetrating to stay in power.

The Greeks chose, by the narrowest of margins, to try to set aside the lavish welfare state model and they chose to trust the establishment politicians one more time to actually do it.

We in America are facing similar, but not identical, choices this election cycle.

As in Greece, there is a radical leftist choice. If we re-elect Barack Obama, Americans will choose a radical leftist who promises to remake American society by spending more, borrowing more and taxing more.

However, in 2010, Americans began to wake-up to the fact that the crisis that has engulfed Greece is about to engulf the United States, and they didn’t trust the establishment elite to fix the problem. 

They chose to elect a new generation of conservative leaders, such as Senators Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul and Congressmen Justin Amash, Chip Cravaak, Tim Huelskamp, to join conservatives in Congress, such as Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Michele Bachmann, who actually had the courage of their convictions the first time around to say “NO” to more spending, deficits and debt.

The process conservatives began in 2010 of replacing the establishment politicians who got us into the spending, deficit and debt crisis continues. Unlike the Greeks, we don’t have to trust the establishment to finally clean-up the crisis they created, because we still have the opportunity to choose conservative leaders, like:

Dan Liljenquist, U.S. Senate Utah (June 26 run-off)

Ted Cruz, U.S. Senate Texas (July 31 run-off)
Steve Stockman, Congress Texas District 36 (July 31 run-off)

Scott Keadle, Congress North Carolina District 4 (July 17 run-off)

Sandy Adams, Congress Florida District 07 (August 14 primary)

Ron Gould, Congress Arizona 04 (August 28 primary)

Matt Salmon, Congress Arizona 05 (August 28 primary)

If we choose to nominate these, and other principled small government constitutional conservatives, we can break the cycle of spend, borrow and tax to buy votes with government benefits, and we won’t have to trust the same establishment politicians who have kept themselves in power through it, to dismantle the corrupt system they themselves created.