In yesterday’s post I wrote:

It’s high time this country grows up and realizes just where nearly eight decades of entitlement program and pork barrel spending by both Democrats and Republicans alike have brought this country’s economic situation to.

Glad to see someone like Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, someone whose writing and opinion I enjoy and deeply respect, is sounding a similar these in his post today:

What do we do know? It’s time to acknowledge that Ponzi schemes don’t work, and that entitlement programs are destined for collapse under current parameters. We can’t possibly tax enough to cover their costs; the problem in this case isn’t revenue as much as it is a lack of suckers on the front end of these schemes. They worked when the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was 16:1, but not when it’s 3:1 or less. Most Americans want a safety net for the elderly and the truly disabled, but in order to have that, we have to severely limit the pool of recipients to those who absolutely cannot work to support themselves, not to those who choose not to work to support themselves. Retirement needs to be self-funded, or not taken at all. We also need to revamp public-sector pension systems that threaten their own tidal waves of default at the state level to get on top of our national liabilities once and for all.

In short, we need to grow up and realize, as Robert Heinlein once instructed us, that there really ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Both Ed and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann are right in calling for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to resign, and hopefully by him doing so and through the resulting confirmation hearings for whomever President Obama nominates as his successor we can finally have an adult conversation about the fiscal mess we’ve gotten ourselves into and how the size, shape, and scope of the federal government needs to change to reduce the deficit and get this country back on solid economic footing. Perhaps that discussion and debate will have to wait until the 2012 presidential campaign gets under way, but yesterday’s news makes it certain that at least discussion will be had, and very soon.

Thank God for that, it’s freakin’ about time.

One other note about yesterday’s downgrade: you may not see any real evidence of it yet, but guarantee this means the apex of LBJ and the “Great Society” – liberalism’s view that government can, and should, be a nanny state taking care of all things for all people from birth to death – has finally, and thankfully, been reached. Endless extensions of unemployment benefits, entitlement programs careening towards bankruptcy without any caps, cuts, or means testing, job-choking regulations from unknown and unseen bureaucracies, well-intended programs designed to remove any kind of risk or unpleasantness from life, even Obamacare itself, they all have to go. There’s nothing left in the till.

It’s already a well-known fact you cannot raise taxes enough to reduce the deficit, let alone cover all the “creative” ways Washington can devise to spend the people’s money. Like one of those gossly obese teens and adults you inevitably come across on one of the Discovery Fit & Heath Channel reality shows, the time for radical treatment and the unpleasant consequences of such has arrived, and we as a people living in a nation that was founded on the principles of truly representative and limited govenment better grow up and get used to the fact that the gravy train is now officially off the rails.