Tuesday, February 17, 2009

$65.5 Trillion in Debt


By Alan Caruba

Today, a man who has been President less than one month in office has signed a piece of legislation rammed through a Congress which probably not one single member has read. It spends billions on what most people of reasonable intelligence understand to be little more than “pork” projects designed to consolidate political power within the Democrat Party.

Why did the Democrats vote for it? Because they could. And because they are all essentially socialists who have now successfully imposed socialism on America.

Jerome R. Corsi, the author of “Obama Nation”, recently calculated that, “The total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, effectively has placed the U.S. government in bankruptcy…” Total obligations exceed four times the annual U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), and the amount is more than the entire GDP of the world.

The nation, since the 1970s has veered from Richard Nixon who took the nation off the gold standard, to the far Left politics of Jimmy Carter who pleased no one, to the recession recovery engineered by Reagan. The caretaker administration of George H.W. Bush was replaced by the centrist political philosophy of Bill Clinton who would later take credit for Republican reforms instituted when the GOP regained control of Congress. What followed were two terms of George W. Bush which no more resembled conservatism than an elephant resembles a mouse.

We have arrived at the administration of Barack Hussein Obama, a man whose vital documents are not merely unavailable to Americans for examination, but who is waging a major legal battle to keep them that way. Do you think, perhaps, he has something to hide?

Throughout it all, from the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt until the present, Americans have more than happily voted for either party offering a government program that would dole out money to them for any reason. FDR’s Social Security and Truman’s Medicare is now mostly paid for by swapping IOUs between various government agencies and departments. There’s little actual cash to keep these programs going.

It would be easier if we could just lay the blame on a particular President, but all have participated and Social Security is widely described as “the third rail” of politics. Credit Bush43 for trying to getting a program going that might actually allow people to have some control of the money taken from them to allegedly fund it.

So, since this is a republic and a democracy, the blame rests ultimately with the American people. We, Americans, voted for these people or at least for some of them.

In his second inaugural address on January 21, 1985, Ronald Reagan said, “An almost unbroken fifty years of deficit spending has finally brought us to a time of reckoning, We have come to a turning point, a moment for hard decisions. I have asked the Cabinet and my staff a question, and now I put the same question to all of you: If not us, who? And if not now, when? It must be done by all of us going forward with a program aimed at reaching a balanced budget. We can then begin reducing the national debt.”

The answer to Reagan’s question by way of George H.W. Bush was William Blythe Clinton who was voted into office by way of saying, “No, Ron, not now and not here.”

So we have all reached a point in our nation’s history where, sooner than we may believe, other nations are going to seriously question whether they want to buy the Treasury notes we want to sell in order to borrow more and more trillions.

A spokesperson for the Chinese government put it quite succinctly, “We hate you.” The U.S. dollar will shortly begin to resemble Zimbabwean money which is utterly worthless.

At the intense urging of President Obama the U.S. Congress has engaged in what can only be called either herd mentality or “magical thinking”; the belief that other nations will bail us out of our financial crisis when, in fact, we have created and spread it like a virus to the entire world.

Note that the Republican Party, with three notable exceptions, unanimously rejected the “stimulus” bill. Too late! They had eight years of the Bush Administration to not act like Democrats. Too late!

Neither Socialism, nor Communism work at all, but even Capitalism has its limits. The game is over.

4 comments:

Guy said...

"Too late! They had eight years of the Bush Administration to not act like Democrats. Too late!

Neither Socialism, nor Communism work at all, but even Capitalism has its limits. The game is over."

I guess that's what I was getting at when I said, in my comment on your Feb 12th post, that the time to push back has passed us by now. We can always try, but we had our big chance to make some significant progress in this country during those years, and what do we have t show for it? I can remember my excitement when I realized that the Republican party had control of the House and Senate, with a Republican President to back them up. Certainly, good things were about to happen, right? Well, we've been let down by the band of thieves we call our representatives, who have long since quit representing us, and don't even bother to try to hide the fact that they don't now. The Republicans' refusal to vote for this stimulus plan was nothing more than grandstanding ... had it been their idea, they would have voted for it in a second, and the Democrats would have been screaming foul. It all just makes me sick to my stomach ...

Alan Caruba said...

Yes, Guy, I fear that even if the GOP regains Congress in 2010 they will lack the guts to reverse most elements of this horrid stimulus bill.

Alan Caruba said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
libertyforusa said...

It is too late for this tube of toothpaste, we can't put it back in the tube, however this leadership has two or three more tubes laid out ready to stomp on. This is a Democrats answer for every problem, tax, spend, regulate!

They have no idea how to undo what they caused.

Reagan said:
If not now, when? If not us, who?

Surgeusa.org is looking to find and tool local conservative leaders. Go to the links page and you will see it is a powerful destination. This is a fantastic and new source. I have been promoting this site because it offers a pragmatic approach to regain our footing and take positive actions against a better organized opposition.
Alans followers have leaders among you and if you want to win you need to become involved.
This is seriously turning into the fight of our lives and for the future of our kids!