Romney isn’t wrong about everything.

File photo by Paul L. Gleiser

Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president, has announced that after just one term, he will not seek reelection to his Utah Senate seat. Good riddance. Few in today’s Republican party will miss him.

A loudly outspoken critic of Donald Trump, Romney became the poster child for the epithet “RINO,” which means, “Republican in Name Only.”

In 2012 we who wanted to deny Barack Obama a second term defended Romney against attempts by Democrats and the media to paint him as a Richie-Rich, elitist silver spoon. But the fact is, that characterization wasn’t entirely wrong.

As an example, Romney joins the ranks of Democrats who want to tax and regulate American consumers and businesses to death in the name of climate change. Climate change is by and large an obsession of guilty, rich white liberals. The entire meme is based almost solely on computer models rather than empirical observation. Not a single cataclysmic prediction put forth by the climate change crowd over multiple decades has ever panned out in the real world.

I supported Romney in 2012 but, like most conservatives, I have since soured on him. But that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong about everything. In the video in which he announced his decision not to run, he said this about Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

On deficits and debt, both men refuse to address entitlements, even though they know that this represents two-thirds of federal spending. Political motivations too often impede the solutions that these challenges demand.”

The challenges do, indeed, demand solutions. The United States, nominally the richest nation in history, is drowning in debt –  $33 trillion worth. The federal government is spending $2 trillion a year more than it takes in.

In somewhat the same way that predictions of climate doom haven’t panned out, decades’ worth of predictions from pundits like me of fiscal Armageddon haven’t come to pass either. But that should provide little comfort. Unlike the unrealized predictions attendant to climate change, there is plenty of history to guide us as to what happens when nations borrow and spend beyond their means. The Russian Revolution in the early 1900s and the French Revolution in the late 1700s were both triggered, in large measure, by the social privations that resulted from both nations having borrowed far more money than they could repay.

We on the right correctly point fingers at Democrats. But President George W. Bush never once in eight years vetoed a spending bill. Donald Trump pointedly refused to discuss the subject of reforming Social Security and Medicare so that those programs might but put on a firm fiscal footing. Whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, Congresses for the past two decades have passed last-minute continuing resolutions rather than engage in the hard work of crafting appropriations bills.

As a result, the country is going broke. That ought to be a big deal. Soon enough, it will be.

But the fact is we’re in this hole because the digging of it has been a bipartisan effort.