Spendthrift Nation

By Alan Caruba

My late Father was a Certified Public Accountant. I am sure he must have wondered if I had been switched in the hospital with another baby who could actually add and subtract, do multiplication and fractions. I have always been a dismal failure with figures, but my older brother who also was a CPA, more than made up for this while I went on to make my living in the world as a writer.

Knowing my lack of skill with numbers, I long ago devised a weekly ledger in which I post expenses relative to my professional and personal life. Every Saturday I get out my calculator, add the new totals, and can tell you that thus far this year I have spent $74.93 on postage, paid AARP $535.60, and that my rent and my auto lease are by far my largest expenses.

So imagine how I and millions of my fellow Americans must feel about a president and a Congress that appear to be stark raving insane when it comes to spending the money they take in as taxes and then borrowing gobs more in order to keep spending?

Socialism gave us our present problems in the form of “entitlement” programs and neither Democrats nor Republicans have been able to resist adding new ones. A new government report from actuaries for Medicare and Medicare on the cost of Obamacare reveals that medical costs will skyrocket rising $389 billion in 10 years.

In my home State of New Jersey, we finally elected a Governor who understands that doing this is nuts. Chris Christie is demanding all manner of cuts in the budget to the distress of elected officials and education flunkies throughout the State who just want to keep on borrowing and spending. He has told the public service unions that the party is over and they are none too happy about it.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) brags, “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama--$60.7 million to be exact.” Well, thank you, Andy Stern.

And, while we’re thanking those that caused the 2008 financial crisis, thank you Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, neither of which Obama mentioned in his recent smack-down to Wall Street. And thank the Congress for creating these entities in the name of “social justice.” The financial crisis, brought about by government entities, required banks and mortgage lending firms to provide loans with no down payment to people who could not afford them. These programs are still in effect.

It takes brass cojones to blame Wall Street for trying to make a dollar by following the rules!

President Obama is a virtual wrecking ball to the American economy.

Barely eight percent of his cabinet members have ever held a “real” job in the private sector. Those vaunted economists advising him are all loons. Several of his first choices for cabinet positions turned out to be tax cheats! And one of them, Tim Geithner, is now the Secretary of the Treasury!

Even someone as arithmetically challenged as myself understands that something is terribly wrong when, in 2009, Americans paid $915 billion in income taxes and the federal government spent $3.5 trillion by borrowing the remainder.

According to the Tax Policy Center, in 2009 just under half of all U.S. households (71 million) will not pay any federal income tax. Now add in the eroding tax base as millions more become jobless. Many of the jobs going to other nations will never return.

As this is written, the U.S. debt comes to $7.5 trillion dollars. Just two years ago the federal deficit was about one-tenth of what it is today.

Please, please, please do not listen to or believe the lies about the economy and jobs coming out of the government these days. There are lots of other sources for business news. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, fifteen percent of workers were unemployed. At 10.7 percent, we are closing in on that.

The government spent like crazy in the 1930s, too. Only the onset of World War Two in 1941 brought an end to a ten-year-long economic nightmare. You have to go back to the end of World War Two for a comparable level of national debt!

Despite blowing billions in a “stimulus” bill, there were no “saved” jobs, only the usual civil service ones as the money was spread around to the States. There will be no “green” jobs to replace those lost as the nation’s primary sources of energy are attacked.

The sensible people in the Tea Party movement know they are in danger of being dragged over the cliff by the hardcore twenty percent of morons, otherwise known as the Democrat Party base, who think that the government will always provide housing, hospitalization, retirement funds, and a full gas tank in everyone’s car.

© Alan Caruba, 2010