For nearly all of us, the size of the national debt is all but unimaginable. If you counted off 14.1 trillion seconds, it would take 447,000 years. Printing 14.1 trillion dollar bills would weigh more than 15 million tons – or, the weight of 136 aircraft carriers the size of the USS Ronald Reagan.

Most of us have become fed up by politicians, especially those of the federal variety. With our federal government bloated unrecognizably out of its constitutional bounds, no facet of life has been left untouched, untaxed or unregulated.

After being rebuked by federal courts, President Obama’s secretary of the interior, former U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO), announced that the ban on offshore drilling would be lifted. Not so, in a practical sense, says Elizabeth Ames Jones, a commissioner on the energy regulating Texas Railroad Commission.

The Financial Times recently reported these dismal figures for private sector hiring: “Since the stimulus began, about 400,000 public sector jobs have been added (through May 2010) while 2.7 million private sector jobs were lost.” The National Federation of Independent Business has a study showing that small businesses in the United States lost jobs in twelve of the last fourteen months. What is equally disturbing in the NFIB survey is that its small business members have no plans to increase hiring in the foreseeable future. Considering that small businesses are responsible for the creation of a majority of new private sector jobs, this is particularly worrisome.

This week the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste issued their annual Congressional scorecard. Our own U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison improved her score over previous years to be listed as a taxpayer hero. While the state’s senior senator continues to have an appetite for earmarks, she’s not alone. Leading the pack of Texans in the U.S. House of Representatives is Chet Edwards (D-Waco), who the watchdog group considers “hostile” to taxpayers.

Liberals must see the handwriting on their electoral wall maps. Beyond the present concerns voters have with the Obama administration, the projected changes that will occur as a result of the 2010 Census seem to predict the political landscape will be very favorable for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. However, it looks like President Obama’s influential supporters may think they’ve found a fix for this inconvenient problem.

If California Democrat Henry Waxman gets his way, state authority over “oil and gas exploration and production” would be usurped by the federal government. That’s how Texas Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones is describing the effects of HR 5626, which is expected to be before Congress in the next several days.

Tomorrow morning, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), will address the National Conference of State Legislatures in Louisville, Kentucky. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if they spoke about what they really thought of the states and Constitutionally-divided government?