John Boehner’s office put this out in advance of Wednesday’s State of the Union speech, in which President Obama is apparently going to run a bunch of giveaways to manufacturers up the flagpole as some sort of stimulus program…

It’s really amazing that a federal government which borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends would even dream of attempting to lead the U.S. economy out of the doldrums. Government leads in wartime; in peace, the people lead.

Of course, that explains why to the Left, everything is a crisis which requires government leadership. Health care’s a crisis, the environment’s a crisis, the economy’s a crisis, education’s a crisis. And we’ve got to have what William James called in 1906 “the moral equivalent of war” to deal with the crisis.

And that means the power of the government brought to bear, more of your money spent and more of your freedom curtailed. We’re all in this together to solve this problem.

Except the problem never does get solved, does it? Any progress made in dealing with the problem merely shows why the agency or agencies involved need more money and an expanded mission.

Until one day you’re borrowing more than 40 cents of every dollar you spend and you’re on the road to being Greece. And rather than put the brakes on this runaway train, folks like Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama just pretend it’s not necessary to have a budget every year. They just run the government on continuing resolutions, because that way they can institutionalize the out-of-control spending they’ve already put in practice. If the country goes broke and the system collapses, that’s OK – they’ll replace it with something that looks a lot more like European socialism than what they’ve got now.

On Saturday, Newt Gingrich said this election is about whether we’re going to be America or whether Obama and Reid get their Eurosocialist state. He’s right. The fact that Obama and his minions refuse to produce a budget is part of that equation.