Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Increasing the Limit The National Debt

Our government has proven that they are very good at spending money but they simply can’t bring themselves to cut spending anywhere. Why is it that they can’t bring themselves to cut spending? It’s not like any of these things go into their household.

What they get out of it is to be elected for another year. I honestly believe they feel they are performing the common good for the people. The problem is that they think they are the social engineers that are to design our society in what they feel this the best way of doing it. They have utopian ideas they feel they are obligated to at least give a try. The reality is that most of these things have already been tried before and they have never worked. They keep trying them think that if they just tweak them enough that they’ll get what they’ve been looking for. The reality is that no amount of tweaking is going to change human nature and this is the thing they think they can change.

Our founding fathers understood only too well what human nature was like and they understood that it was always the thing that got in the way as well as that it was something that could not be changed. People are people. They can’t change. Greed is what it is. You can’t regulate it away. These men were religious men almost to a one. They may have held different religious ideas of who God was but for the most part they knew what man was. They knew that man would not change short of an act of God which happens infrequently at best.

Because of this they saw that they had to form a government in such a way that these things offset each other through a series of what they called checks and balances. Overall I would say that they did a pretty good job. They set enough things in place that it would take a fairly concerted effort for the system to be overcome. This is what we see happening now.

They also foresaw that banking and the ability to print as much money as they wanted could ultimately be the ruin of our nation we well. They understood that printing all that money being covered by nothing more than the faith and good will of the people would eventually come crashing down. They tried as much as they could to put things in place to prevent this. It is one of the reasons that they put it in the constitution that money was only supposed to be gold and silver coin. In this way fiat money could not be created. The problem is that our non-representing representatives from long ago decided that section of the constitution either didn’t exist or didn’t apply.

They decided a central bank was required and for some reason they also determined that this bank would not answer to anyone but themselves. This certainly doesn’t sound like the wisdom of our forefathers at work. It sounds more like the pressure of some small group of people who saw their opportunity in dealing with a bunch of representatives who knew nothing of economics, the budget or business. Thus was created the Federal Reserve which has more or less been with us for over 100 years.

The Federal Reserve is now issuing ultimatums to the government and our non-representing representatives don’t know what to do with them. So far it has worked out already, though the government has been aware all along that they’re not really in control and they’re afraid to do anything about it.

Ron Paul is one of the few people who has been willing to say anything about the federal reserve and in his case he always harkens back to the constitution something so few others are willing to do. Why are people so afraid to discuss the constitution? Why do they behave as though it is something that is out of date and therefore untrustworthy in some way? The constitution in many respects is timeless in its own way. These men saw well into the future. They understood only too well about such things as debt.

Our founders talked about not putting the nation’s debt on the next generation. They worked hard to produce something that would not allow that to happen. For some reason many of the people we’ve chosen as leaders hold the constitution in disdain. They feel that it is outdated. They decry the constitution as though it were a failure, yet they swear an oath to defend and uphold it, all the while seeking ways to do away with it or overcome it in any area they don’t like.

It is odd again there is so little reporting on Indiana, a state that is no posting over $400 million dollars in surplus due to cuts in government spending. They didn’t raise taxes at all. What they did was slim the budget down to much lower rates, they cut back where they could and now they have a comfortable surplus. I’m sure given the same circumstances with the federal government the first thing they’d do with that surprise surplus is look for places to spend it, after all they certainly couldn’t consider cutting back even more on taxes if they didn’t really need the money.

They always have to show that not only do they need all the money they’re taking in, but they need at least 25%-40% more than that. This is how they justify all the taxes they want to keep taking from the people. Of course they tell us all this money is for our good, but as I’ve said in many other places, “why do we need shrimp treadmills?”

Fiscal responsibility is a part of spiritual responsibility. The scripture tells us to owe no many anything except to love him. This being the case I think it is safe to assume that the same is true of the responsibilities of our government.

It would seem the debt limit means little to anyone. It was reported at Brietbart.com today that:

“… foreign investors don't seem too concerned. They bought $38 billion in U.S. government debt in May, increasing their holdings 0.6 percent to $4.51 trillion, the Treasury Department said Monday.

This even though the U.S. reached its $14.3 trillion borrowing limit in May. And the Treasury says Congress now has just 14 days to raise that borrowing limit or the government will default.”
So they are allowing the debt to increase regardless of what congress does. Once again the congress is showing that it has become meaningless in the politics of America. As one third of the balance of power in our nation they are not doing their job at all. They vote for things that increase the debt and don’t deal with other things that have not been authorized. I suppose they’ll just tack this on to the debt limit they know and have already determined they’re going to raise. They’ll just include it as part of the new limit and act as though it was part of the original negotiations.

This is just one example of how the debt has gotten away from us. Our media is still doing nothing to combat this situation at all. I wonder if we’re ever going to get this under control. Even the media has realized they are overusing such terms as kicking the can down the road.

Most do not really consider just how serious our debt really is. Following are the real numbers.

Total Unfunded Promises and Liabilities
14,500,000,000,000    Total Liabilities
7,700,000,000,000    Social Security
31,000,000,000,000    Medicare (A,B)
7,200,000,000,000    Medicare (D)
2,000,000,000,000    Miscellaneous
62,400,000,000,000

Now just consider this for a moment. This amounts to over 200,000 for every man woman and child in the United States. Will you ever get that much back from the government? So then you have to ask yourself, “What are they doing with it? For a family of 4 this amounts to almost 1 million dollars. Does this seem reasonable at all? Does this seem responsible? I just can’t see how anyone can justify this kind of spending. What exactly are we getting for all that money?

Why is there no serious call to our leaders for a real explanation, not a lot of political speak that really says nothing. This is the reason we have the size of government today that we have. We have not been willing to demand accountability from our government. We have happily let them spend our money. Their method of extracting the money is probably one of the most ingenious methods of collecting taxes in the history of the world. They make our employers into tax collectors taking out our taxes before we ever see the money and so we don’t miss it nearly as much.

If our congress would do nothing else I can only wish that they would do away with tax withholding so every American had to write a check to the government every month. I have little doubt that if that happened we would have a tax revolt in this nation so quickly it would make your head spin. No doubt we would get rid of the IRS in short order as well as many other changes that should have been made a long time ago.

We desperately need to demand more from our leaders. If we do not our nation is going to cave in before much longer and when that happens there will be no recovery. We have been free for so long and for the most part almost no one living remembers the great depression and so we have come to think it cannot happen to us. Worse we think at the most we would end up in another great depression and of course we’ll come out of it like we did last time. Maybe people are forgetting what got us out the last time was a war. Yes, we had an incredibly progressive society at that time as well that was trying to bring Marxism, or communism to our nation, at the very least some form of socialist government. But back then it only had about 10 years to go. Socialism is now far more ingrained in our society than it has ever been before and it is not likely we are going to see our way out of this unless we are willing to really fight back and stop being so politically correct all the time.

Political correctness, which is just another word for propaganda and intimidation are nothing but a method of control. Modern advertisers and publicity people have turned this tool into a fine art, but and because it looks to be mostly motivated by sales we do not think in terms of just how dangerous it is. We need to call it what it is propaganda!

This same propaganda war now rages regarding our economy. You almost have to wonder from listening to the way the media and our non-representing representatives spin it what is right. Rather than listen to their words look at the results of their actions. Are we better off today either as individuals, as a nation, or as a business/working environment than we were 20 years ago?

I know the younger people today don’t really even remember 20 year ago, except as children who let their parents worry about such things as the economy, but we need to face it, the economy is not healthy, our nation is not healthy, and our business environment is also not healthy. Something needs to be done about this.

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