Your Opinion: U.S. must go on tax-and-spend diet

Dear Editor:

When liberal pundits and politicians label conservatives as cruel, heartless, or mean-spirited for trying to reign in bloated federal spending, it's easy to agree with them if all you think about are the "feel-good" benefits.

But you can't just do what feels good without weighing the costs too.

Here's an analogy to consider. Would a doctor be considered cruel, heartless, or mean-spirited if he told obese patients to start exercising and stop eating so much, otherwise they're going to die of a heart attack? No, of course not.

The doctor isn't asking the patients to starve to death, he's asking them to take common sense measures to get back to good health. In fact, it would actually be more cruel if the doctor pretended nothing was wrong; thereby encouraging his obese patients to keep over-eating to the point they died.

Well, the same applies to our current economic and political situations. When liberals pretend that it will be OK to keep raising the debt ceiling and taxes, and keep entitlement programs unchanged, they actually are being more cruel, heartless, and mean-spirited than the conservatives who have realistic cost-cutting budget plans.

If our government continues to tax and spend us into even greater debt, we will "eat up" right up to the point that our federal government has a heart attack. Who is going to take care of all the people dependent on government assistance at that point? It won't be the government.

Don't believe me? Look at the situation in Greece. That country is having its heart attack right now, and the people are rioting because their government can no longer afford to give them all the "feel-good" things they are used to having.

If we want to avoid being the next Greece, we have to stop pretending everything is going to be OK as is, and demand that our president and legislators start on our budgetary diet and exercise right now.