Politics & Power Quote by Alan Keyes

The “government’s credit card” is doing a lot of rhetorical work here: it shrinks the sprawling machinery of the federal state into a household object associated with impulse buys, bad habits, and overdue bills. Alan Keyes isn’t just arguing about fiscal policy; he’s staging a morality play in which Washington behaves like an undisciplined spender who needs their plastic confiscated. That framing invites a particular emotional response - frustration, even contempt - and then offers a clean fix: enforce hard limits so the adult supervision of “discipline” can finally begin.

The intent is strategic: shift the debate away from what government purchases actually are (wars, retirement benefits, disaster relief, infrastructure) and toward the character of the purchaser. Once you accept the metaphor, spending cuts become less a choice among competing public priorities and more a corrective punishment for misbehavior. It’s also a preemptive strike against the common political escape hatch: borrowing to postpone pain. Keyes wants to close off that option so elected officials can’t buy time, spread costs across future taxpayers, or avoid angering today’s voters.

The subtext is where the politics live. “Limits on both tax revenue and borrowing” sounds evenhanded, but it rigs the playing field: if revenue is capped and borrowing is constrained, the only remaining lever is shrinking programs. That’s not just austerity; it’s a constitutionalized preference for a smaller federal government, achieved not through persuading voters program by program, but through tightening the fiscal noose until cuts become inevitable. Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st century conservative project: turn budget politics into a test of virtue, and make government incapacity look like principled restraint.