The Dream         Watching a senate oversight hearing on TV at One O'clock in the morning on the president's debt commission report makes as much sense as watching paint dry.  When the proceedings arrived at Obama's offer to freeze discretionary spending for five years at current levels, it was clearly time to go to bed.  Shortly afterward a dream arrived, and shed perfect clarity on the nation's most pressing problem, exactly the way dreams do.         The focus on discretionary spending did not sit quite right as I wandered off to dreamland.  Immediately afterward my wife and I were in a private six or eight passenger plane.  She took the plane off from the runway, removed herself from the planes controls, and came back to sit with me in the passenger seats.  As we were the only two folks on the plane, I was concerned that the plane was pilotless and would soon crash.          In our short discussion I asked her what she was doing, and why she was no longer at the controls.  She sat there in perfect silence, a condition that is possible only in a dream.  She continued to sit there in silence like the tar baby.  I was concerned that she had taken the plane off, and she should return quickly to the controls before we crashed.  Shortly thereafter we were flying very low over a large body of water, rocking both left and right in clear danger.  Like Sullenberger's landing on the Hudson, we splashed to a hair-raising landing like a pelican, floated up to the shore, and were able to get out of the plane without incident.

The Interpretation         Some weird dream!  On recalling the key words "discretionary spending" the dream's clear meaning applied perfectly to our flight.  In the dream the pilot was discretionary and was at the controls until the plane had taken off.  From that point on, flying, like spending, was on autopilot.  Don't worry!  We are on autopilot.          Unlike airplanes, many in our government seem to believe that we have two classes of spending, discretionary and entitlements.  Because entitlements are cast in concrete, our legislators and many in the executive branch seem to believe entitlements are sacrosanct, and must not be touched.  Entitlements are on autopilot, as if the plane had one.  In government, entitlements are all on autopilot.  If not, they are the "third rail" which will electrocute anybody who messes with them.          Unfortunately our legislators, and our president, are all hooked into a system in which they believe their own re-election is more important than dealing responsibly with the nation's primary problems, entitlements.         The rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say, was the financial punch-line.  Even on autopilot, every pilotless plane will eventually crash, as Payne Stewart never discovered.  The country's primary financial obligations are on autopilot.  Those at the controls are spitting in the ocean with discretionary spending while the plane is running out of gas.  The crash is inevitable, and nobody is responsible.

Application to Government          At some point in our nation's history, every proposed expenditure was discretionary.  All entitlements were once discretionary spending enacted into law.  The language since coined to describe the process so clearly codifies our legislators that they now believe that their only control is over discretionary items, while the all the rest, a heritage from history over years or decades, they need not worry about.  This is the problem.  These expenditures year after year are swept under the federal financial carpet in continuing resolutions with no discussion, no validation, and essentially no oversight.  They are all on autopilot through legislative and executive fiat.  Don't worry!!