Addressing the possibility of the GOP-led Congress not voting to raise the debt ceiling, Austan Goolsbee, President Obama’s top economic adviser, histrionically asserted this month: “This is not a game. The debt ceiling is not something to toy with. If we hit the debt ceiling, that’s . . . essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.”

In context, his comments are more than a bit hypocritical.

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On Sunday, Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that Medicare will now pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling as part of seniors’ annual physicals. A similar provision was originally included in ObamaCare, but Democrats stripped it out amid the death panel furor. Now Medicare will enact the same policy through regulation.

We hadn’t heard about this development until Mr. Pear’s story, but evidently Medicare tried to prevent the change from becoming public knowledge. The provision is buried in thousands of Federal Register pages setting Medicare’s hospital and physician price controls for 2011 and concludes that such consultations count as a form of preventative care.

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Key words: next year. Not 2012, and certainly not 2013.

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What our great nation just watched was the Democratic Party preview its political strategy for the next two years. It also watched a united Senate GOP defeat that approach, though not before a handful of Republicans considered walking straight into the Democratic trap. The whole episode was an early peek at the GOP’s biggest challenge going forward.

That challenge is, as it always is, spending. Republicans lost in 2006 primarily because of their profligacy, and they won this year primarily because they swore off that profligacy. It’s that simple—and don’t think Democrats don’t know it. President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi understand that the surest, quickest and most delicious way to undermine their opponents is to tempt them into renouncing their own promises of fiscal responsibility. The added beauty is that Democrats continue to get exactly what they want: bigger government.

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Today’s auction of 10- and 30-year US Treasury notes and bonds won’t tell us as much about the US economy as auctions used to — because the Federal Reserve has started buying up the notes as part of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s “quantitative easing” effort.

Until recently, a plentitude of bidders for long-term US government debt was a sign the US economy was strong. But Bernanke is buying that debt in what he says is an effort to make the economy stronger.

This has a lot of people nervous — and the news that the Fed may spend up to $800 billion on this, rather than the $600 billion figure initially given, doesn’t help.

Even if the purpose is to stimulate the economy, increase stock prices and lower interest rates, the effect of Bernanke’s policy may be monetizing the nation’s growing debt — printing new money to finance deficit spending.

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NPR’s firing of commentator Juan Williams this week is one of the worst examples of rush to judgment since 9/11.

Mr. Williams, whether one tends to agree with him or not, is immensely respected by his fellow journalists and viewers alike for his ability to conduct himself with dignity and respect in a field where extremes of opinion and low-ball tactics have become all too common. He’s mostly a moderate liberal who is able to hear other points of view with respect, and he can be nuanced in his own views.

In these times, Mr. Williams’s instinct for finding both middle and common ground is no small feat.

And for what offense has he been pilloried by the censorship squad of NPR? For saying out loud what many Americans think—that he gets nervous when he’s on a plane and sees people dressed in traditional Muslim garb.

As an Arab-American of Muslim descent, I am not offended by this because in all honesty I have had the same reaction in similar circumstances.

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In the Oct. 13 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., observed that President Barack Obama’s Keynesian economic program had failed, and that pro-growth tax reforms offered the best route to economic recovery. The senator then offered his “Growth Agenda for America,” which amounts to an excellent plan for fixing fiscal and regulatory policy.

Unfortunately the “Growth Agenda” won’t work unless America’s badly broken monetary policy is repaired at the same time. Starting where we are now, implementing the “Growth Agenda” without monetary reforms would cruelly disappoint the American people and discredit supply-side economics.

Sen. Kyl proposes limiting government spending to 18% to 19% of GDP, lowering the corporate tax rate, flattening income tax rates, lowering tax rates across the board and increasing congressional oversight of regulatory overreach. However, Kyl’s plan ignores the elephant in the room: monetary policy. In terms of their power to affect the economy, if regulations have an impact of 1, then taxes have an impact of 10 and money has an impact of 100.

The primary cause of our accumulated economic problems is the deteriorating monetary environment.

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During last year’s “Jobs Summit,” President Obama said he was open to any good idea to get the economy moving again. Today he should be especially so, since Washington’s many monetary and fiscal policy decisions have not been able to spur the robust growth or job expansion that we all would like. And yet there is a simple idea—the trillion-dollar elephant in the room—that has apparently been dismissed for no good reason.

One trillion dollars is roughly the amount of earnings that American companies have in their foreign operations—and that they could repatriate to the United States. That money, in turn, could be invested in U.S. jobs, capital assets, research and development, and more.

But for U.S companies such repatriation of earnings carries a significant penalty: a federal tax of up to 35%. This means that U.S. companies can, without significant consequence, use their foreign earnings to invest in any country in the world—except here.

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We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment. But the popular uproar pales in comparison to the sense of humiliation that we Americans are quite broke.

In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush, not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits.

The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration, and despite six years of an allegedly small-government Republican Congress, the deficit nearly doubled from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion in just eight years.

Barack Obama apparently never figured out that he had been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people.

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