Pearls: Reserving judgment for the time being
EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl
Now, I realize in the great scope of the world’s population, I’m not particularly old.
According to current statistics, the median age of a human being on earth is 30.6 years—meaning that if you lined up every living person and picked the person in the middle of that long chain of humanity, he or she would be about 30 years and about 7 months old.
Well, I’m more than a decade and a half past that mark, which puts me into the older half of humanity.
My promise to you is that I have endeavored (and will continue to endeavor) to seek greater wisdom, a quality that can efficiently accompany age: unless we choose willfully to become old fools, that is.
I do not claim to be wise. I claim to be wiser than I was when I was 30 years and 7 months old. My favorite outcome of aging thus far has been my increased ability to stay calm about things. I read what’s happening, I think and I make my judgments, same as many of you do. But the things that would have had me whooping and hollering 20 years ago often don’t do much more than cause me to furrow my brow these days.
Since the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) started its work a few weeks back, I have watched my friends behave in one of two precise fashions: either they are throwing their hands in the air like fresh converts at a gospel revival, or they speak as if actual pieces of the sky were landing in their yards.
But my old man calm has taken over, and I’m reserving judgment for the time being. I can see both sides, can’t you?
It’s new—an expansion of government that has been initiated to root out government waste. There’s a smidgin of irony there, I suppose. But in the sense that it’s an untested method for dealing with a government that, according to a PBS poll, 6 out of 10 Americans believe is spending too much money, I get jittery. I trust very few people to be good stewards of this land and its forward course.
Still, we have established that a majority of Americans think government is too big, and I am one of them. As the DOGE list of questionable government programs and expenditures is brought to light, there are items on said list that I do believe need to be weeded out of our overextended budget.
That’s not to say that certain of the programs or expenses listed aren’t positive, even beneficial, but you can’t pay for everything you want if you’re going to stick to a budget. You might like this car and that truck, but the fact that both are good purchases does not excuse your buying two vehicles when you had one budgeted.
When some projections have the U.S. running a $1.8 trillion national deficit by this coming November—on top of an existing nearly $36.5 trillion debt—most Americans are feeling like several things need to be better managed in Washington. Whether that actually should have required an expansion of government targeting excess spending—DOGE, as it has come to be known—will continue to be debatable.
Chances are that there could be some, if not several, element(s) of the DOGE cuts that don’t set perfectly well with you. When budgets get cut, people lose their jobs—and it’s not a difficult exercise to empathize with folks who have to find new occupations and move their families. I take no joy from imagining it.
I know that if I bought that truck in our last example, then it takes money out of the pocket of the other dealer who was trying to sell me that car. But I can’t buy two vehicles just so someone else can keep his job, can I?
How long can we spend money we don’t have with currency that has lost value on items we can’t afford? Can we really hold morale higher than our morals?
More importantly, can the left and the right ever come to a consensus on which of those (morale and morality) is which?
Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.
