As most everyone knows, the federal government is now in debt to the tune of more than $22 trillion. Since federal officials are now spending, on an annual basis, around a trillion dollars more than what they are bringing in with taxes, that is going to raise the federal debt by a trillion dollars every year. We are reminded of this phenomenon by the periodic debate on whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, an implicit acknowledgment that too much federal debt is not a good thing, especially since the feds will ultimately tax the American people to pay back what they have borrowed to fund their welfare-warfare state.

On the welfare-state side, the big-ticket items are Social Security and Medicare, the two crown jewels of the American welfare state. Abolishing them would go a long way toward resolving the fiscal problem.

Yet, to even suggest such a thing brings howls of lamentation, despair, and rage from both conservatives and liberals. These two socialist programs go to the core of their joint statist philosophy. They're not about to touch either one, especially since that would alienate seniors, who unfortunately have grown dependent on the government dole.

On the warfare-state side, the big-ticket items are the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA, along with their foreign and domestic empire of military bases and their forever wars, occupations, regime-change operations, coups, invasions, wars of aggression, and ongoing assassination program. Dismantling America's national-security establishment and restoring a limited-government republic to our land would go a long way toward resolving the fiscal problem.

Yet, to even suggest such a thing brings howls of lamentation, despair, and rage from both conservatives and liberals. The warfare state goes to the core of their joint statist philosophy. Moreover, there is no possibility that the national-security establishment would ever consent to its own dismantling or to even a major reduction in the amount of tax money that it expects to be allocated every year.

In the middle of this fiscal morass are a multitude of mid-sized or small-sized federal programs, such as the drug war, farm subsidies, education grants, the SBA, and Radio Martí. Abolishing all of them would go a long way toward resolving the fiscal crisis. But conservative and liberal supporters maintain that abolishing any one of them would do nothing significant to reduce overall federal spending and, therefore, they say, each and every one of them should be left intact.