As I laid out in my last letters, our economic future doesn’t have to end this way. And candidly, the proposals I’ve suggested are not the only way that we can sort out our tax and incentive structures and achieve positive results. I can think of quite a few paths we could take. But just tinkering around the edges and more or less doing what were doing now is not going to get us where we need to go.

A recession is an avoidable dilemma, but averting the nasty economic storm that is brewing now will require leadership and compromise that haven’t been seen in Washington DC for some time. In general, the feedback I’ve gotten from my letter to the would-be president series has been quite good – much better than I expected. But the one real pushback from friends and readers is the very simple, skeptical question, “John, you don’t really think that this will happen, do you?”

Sadly, I must admit that I don’t. I am generally an optimistic person, and I would like to think that the people we elect this fall will do the right thing. But we’ve been saying that for about 16 years now. Our so-called leaders’ record on doing the right thing with regard the deficits and the economy is not cause for jubilation.

So, I think the more likely outcome is that we’ll have a recession and $1.5 trillion deficits and mountainous deficits as far as the eye can see, because it is really quite an impossible task to balance the budget without new taxes and growth incentives and without the massive fiscal stimulus that could come by repurchasing the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet to invest in infrastructure that would create 2 million+ jobs.

It was Rahm Emanual, the beleaguered current mayor of Chicago (why on God’s green earth did he want that job?), who once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

While the next recession will surely plunge us into a crisis, that crisis will afford an opportunity that those who want to restructure our federal government. The attempt will, quite frankly, require an end run around Congress. Thankfully, the founders of the republic stuck a helpful little section for that purpose into the Constitution. It’s called Article 5. It allows for 34 states to call a Convention of States to propose amendments to the Constitution, which then have to be sent back to the various state legislatures to win the approval of 38 states – no small feat. I will readily admit that it will take a crisis to push some of the needed states into the “let’s just do it” category. Getting 34 states to agree is a daunting task, but we might just get the crisis we need to accomplish that, and hopefully the country will not waste it.

The next section is a letter authored by former Oklahoma Senator Dr. Tom Coburn, one of my personal heroes. Tom was demonstrably the most fiscally conservative member of the Senate, constantly trying to figure out how to reform the process and get back to a balanced budget like the one we had in the later Clinton years. Unfortunately, Tom developed cancer (which is now apparently under control, thank God) and term-limited himself. We have corresponded and met off and on, and he is a personal inspiration as well as an enthusiastic believer that things can be changed. We need more like him, and I wish he were back in the Senate.

There are six states that have already passed the legislation necessary for calling a Convention of States. There will be another four or five that do so this year and perhaps between 10 and 12 next year. The organization pushing this issue will thus be able to focus their time and budget on getting the remaining states to make the call. So without further ado, let’s look at how we can take the process of fixing the problems in Washington DC back to the people.

An Outside the Box Solution as Big as Our Nation’s Problems

By Senator Tom Coburn

Precision in numbers is critical to accountants and important to economists. But for most other people, there is a point at which a number gets so big that its increase seems irrelevant. This is a variation of the law of diminishing returns: the bigger the number, the less impact it has, because it is so far removed from anything people can relate to.

That is what has happened with the numbers reflecting our astounding national debt.

Nineteen trillion plus (and rising rapidly) dollars of debt on the books. One hundred forty trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities to boot. How many Americans can truly have any concept of what those numbers mean? If the deficit soon balloons to $1.5 trillion, the problem will become more severe.      

And as the numbers continue to grow higher (what comes after a trillion?), ordinary Americans become inoculated to rational concern about the looming disaster they represent. We keep hearing these astronomical figures, but we go on about our business as usual and feel no impact of the predicted storm. Some people even dare to hope that if the “right” candidate is elected President this year, they will receive more goodies from an increasingly generous Uncle Sam who maintains every outward appearance of being flush with cash.

Unlike a natural disaster, which sometimes comes with little warning and always through no fault of our own, our nation’s impending financial crisis is completely predictable and is the outcome of a machine we created and continue to operate.  It is an outcome of the federal government over which we, the people, have ultimate control.

We got into this mess because we have allowed the feds to operate far beyond their specific, enumerated constitutional powers. However well-intentioned the politicians who envisioned a national government program, policy, or regulation as the answer to every human need or problem, they were wrong. And now we are staring down the hard consequences of glossing over the original meaning of the Constitution, which never allowed for the type of plenary federal government we have today.