Washington has hit a new low: Democrats are accusing Republicans, who are attempting to right our fiscal ship by reforming entitlement programs for the poor and elderly, of seeking to harm women, children and other vulnerable members of our society.
This verbal assault is deliberate and premeditated. Those attacks might make for good politics. But they are terrible for the future of our country.
People in Washington might try to deny it, but the fiscal crisis we face is real. Our debt is over $14 trillion dollars and climbing. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said our debt is the single greatest national security threat our nation faces today.
The International Monetary Fund has warned that the United States has to act. And Moody's is threatening to downgrade our nation's credit rating unless we act. Unfortunately, Democrats have continued the spending and even blocked common-sense spending reductions Republicans have proposed.
Under the first two years of President Obama's administration, federal spending went up by 84 percent if you count the ineffective stimulus. They wanted to ax deductions for American energy producers not for deficit reduction, but for more Washington spending.
And when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., put forward a proposal to sell off close to $100 billion in unused federal property -- the other side still said no.
And when it comes to our entitlements, Democrats are living in complete denial. They say Social Security's finances are just dandy. But the fact is that the disability trust fund will be exhausted by 2018, and the overall trust fund will be exhausted in 2036, a year earlier than we previously thought.
As bad off as Social Security is, the situation with Medicare is even worse. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare will be insolvent in 2020. According to the Medicare Trustees, Medicare's unfunded liability is $38.4 trillion.
And what is the Democrats' response to this? All is well. Nothing to see here. Please move along.
This is what the Democratic candidate in the New York special election had to say about her opponent's claim that reforms to Medicare were necessary to restore the solvency of this program: "That's simply a scare tactic to tell our seniors that there will be nothing for them. ... That's not the truth."
A liberal surrogate for the Democrats is currently running an advertisement that shows House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan pushing an old woman in a wheelchair over a cliff.
The head of the Democratic National Committee -- fresh from lecturing conservatives about civility in politics -- described the House budget as a "tornado through nursing homes."
It's not Republicans trying to scare seniors. The simple fact is that supporting the status quo is supporting the destruction of Social Security and Medicare. And that is the true threat to America's elderly, and to a bright fiscal future for our children and grandchildren.
Unfortunately, the Democrats who control the Senate have decided that they have no responsibility to govern or to come up with any solutions to fix our nation's mounting problems.
Under the Congressional Budget Act, the House and the Senate are to report a budget by April 15 of each year. President Obama submitted his budget. And the Republican-led House met the April 15 deadline. But Senate Democrats have no budget of their own. None -- zero -- zilch.
So the Democratic Senate majority leader deferred to the Republican House's budget. He did this for one simple reason: He didn't want to come up with his own plan, but wanted to attack any Republican idea to bring down our debt that is driven by our near-bankrupt entitlements.
It was reassuring that President Clinton reminded Democrats that they must act to reform Medicare. The question is, where is the rest of his political party? Where is the president? Why can't we start a real adult conversation about these programs?
Sen. Orrin Hatch is a Republican from Utah.
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