Deroy Murdock‘s latest column explains why Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the American government’s debt rating could be described as a “patriotic act of tough love.”

In the short term, this unprecedented news will hammer national prestige, hike interest rates, and heap short-term agony on an already achy nation. However, this startling development may supply the face-down-in-the-gutter moment that Washington’s bipartisan spendaholics desperately need to hit rock bottom, grow up, and enter rehab. Alas, everything else has failed during the Bush-Obama era of the ever-expanding state.

Consider Washington’s latest fiscal flop. There is plenty to dislike about the recently enacted bipartisan deal to cut spending and reduce the national debt. For starters, it neither cuts spending nor reduces the national debt. After weeks of federal handwringing, taxpayers should hope that our masters in Washington become serious about slashing spending. If not, this republic will implode, not sometime on “the children,” but soon — atop today’s struggling adults.

“The budget deal doesn’t cut federal spending at all,” Cato Institute analyst Chris Edwards explains. “The ‘cuts’ in the deal are only cuts from the Congressional Budget Office’s ‘baseline,’ which is a Washington construct of ever-rising spending. . . . The federal government will still run a deficit of $1 trillion next year. This deal will ‘cut’ the 2012 budget of $3.6 trillion by just $22 billion, or less than 1 percent.”