For those of you who believe that all the promises being made my those seeking election/reelection and using that four letter “F” word “FREE” quite freely… you need to get a copy of the book to the left – if still in print… It was co-authored by the co-chairman of the commission that Pres Regan created to tell the government to solve its long term financial problems. Of course, the final plan was shoved on some shelf and never looked at again.
A lot of what is outlined in the book …while is two decades late… we are – IMO – at the cusp of what is outlined in the book.
There is enough blame to go around for the extra 9-10 TRILLION dollar debt that has been amassed during the last 7.5 yrs… Our increased national debt during that period equals/greater to the debt out country amassed since 1776. There has been one President and four different Congresses with 535 members who are all complicit and equally to blame.
The Senate didn’t pass a budget for 6-7 yrs… our country just spent money like we could just print more money as we needed it. The Federal Reserve has been complicit in this “drunken spending” by keeping the interest rate at near ZERO. Sooner or later that interest rate will have to return to its historic norm of 4% – 6%. When this happens we will have abt ONE TRILLION annual interest bill to pay.
Currently our Federal Gov spends about FOUR TRILLION… which includes abt 400 billion in interest expense and exceeds our revenue by about 500 billion.
Kind of reminds me of a lot of kids that go off to college… get credit cards, max out the amount of money they can borrow – often in excess of what is needed for tuition/room/board.. uses the excess to pay the minimum payments on all the credit cards they have ran up. Then 6 months after graduation… the first payment comes due and the interest starts to apply.. and all too many find themselves with with too little income and too much out go.. and they end up back living in their parent’s house.
When the “chickens” come home to roost.. the Federal government has no “parent’s house” to go to… they only have the money in the pockets of it citizens to help it pay its bills.
No matter which Presidential candidate promises new “FREE” something… there is no money in the “piggy bank” to pay for it.
Even the promise of fixing our infrastructure to “create jobs”.. the only problem with this is once the road or 
bridge is fixed… what does the “newly employed” construction workers do for a income ?
Congress has stripped all the monies out of all the trust funds… mostly during the Bil Clinton Administration… how do you think that the government all of a sudden started showing annual budget surpluses ?
They put SS, Medicare, Medicare disability on a pay as you go basis. Unfortunately, the Medicare disability fund is near going into a 20% negative cash flow and the SS trust fund has about another 15 yrs before it goes into a negative cash flow…
Strangely enough, Pres Johnson started the Medicare/Medicaid program just as the baby boomers entered the work place and it will come up short just as the youngest baby boomer start entering retirement age.
Vote for whoever you want – things won’t change ! OMG !
This is a post from a couple of days ago, suggesting that the politicians that we elect are nothing but “puppets” for the “back room” non-elected regulators that really runs the entire governmental mess.
From that article it would seem that those that are impacting the chronic pain community the most (DEA,CDC,FDA) would seem to be part of that “back room governmental regulators” who only report to themselves.
Even “voting the bums out” … but.. the only recourse pts may end up having is suing those healthcare providers that abandon pts.
Filed under: General Problems
This is very troubling to me as a former CPA and economics minor. The chickens will always come home to roost at some point. You simply can’t print more money unless you want to send the economy into hyper inflation like some Latin American countries. Even the way the government uses the word SURPLUS is misleading. If the budget were balanced or we had cash inflow greater than cash outflow for one budget year that is NOT A SURPLUS. A surplus exists only when you have no DEBT, no interest to pay on debt, and THEN AND ONLY THEN when cash inflow exceeds cash outflow each year can the government tell us that we have a surplus. Most people don’t understand this basic concept.
As you stated, there is plenty of blame to go around. As far as SS and SSD is concerned, if the beltway crooks never dipped their grubby hands into those funds for other purposes, there wouldn’t be an issue with solvency.
We need a zero based budgeting process and a law requiring a balanced budget every year. The president needs to have the power of the line item veto.
Massive corporate subsidies need to go. Health care costs need to be much lower than they are now. I’m not sure how that would be accomplished unless the patient was able to shop around for their own care and had to pay for it directly from their own pocket. It would force doctors to compete for patients. Ending the War on Drugs would save a lot of money. Reforming the criminal justice system would also save a lot of money. Military contracts that are Cost Plus are a recipe for companies to spend like drunken sailors since the United States will pay the tab. And all of those pork barrel projects that get put into the budget every year must go. This is where the line item veto would come in handy. I know we have a need to protect our interests abroad but we go above and beyond what is necessary. We have gotten involved in regime change that we had no business getting involved in at all. And we have too many alphabet agencies to count and many of them perform redundant tasks. And the list goes on and on and on. Yes there will be a day of reckoning. When it takes a wheel barrel of money just to buy bread and milk the chickens will have come home to roost.
The Republicans used to run on the platform of limited government. Butt that has become only rhetoric. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. The problem with the Republican party is they want to legislate morality and force everyone in the country to believe as they believe.
Our lawmakers and our executive branch cannot serve two masters. They cannot serve the interest of big donors while serving the interests of their constituents. The Revolutionary War was fought over taxation without representation. Who knew that 200 + years later the very government we created would be doing the same thing to us that England was doing to us?
I was supporting Bernie Sanders not because he was promising free college but because he was adamant about getting big donors out of politics. But the idea of educating our citizens to prepare them for the job market that exists today is a very smart move. I believe it was Ben Franklin who said that a democracy cannot be successful without an educated citizenry. That is absolutely true. When our economy was an agricultural-based economy an eighth grade education was all that was necessary. When the Industrial Revolution occurred it was clear that an eighth-grade education was no longer sufficient. So that gave us K through 12. We are no longer a manufacturing-based economy. And a K-12 education is no longer sufficient. Providing 4 more years of education beyond high school or vocational training for those not interested in college is a wise investment in our citizens. Just the back that they would be paying in higher taxes because they would have hired earning potential makes it a wise investment.
The entire tax code needs to be scrapped and the loopholes done away with. A flat tax rate for corporations and for individuals would be ideal. It makes no sense for the ultra-wealthy to pay no income tax while the poor working stiffs end up paying an effective tax rate of 20 – 25% of their income.
This is a very complicated subject and the fix is going to be very painful. We are certainly leaving our children with one huge mess.
An intriguing fact: Fifteen years ago next month, a gang of Saudi billionaires led by Osama bin-Laden launched a kamikaze air strike on New York and Washington that killed over 2900 people immediately and gave cancer and other chronic illness to many more.
The Congress appointed a committee to investigate this act of piracy. (I call it “piracy”, because it was an act of war, committed by people who were not a nation. They merely teamed up to carry out the attack. They are not combatants under the Geneva Convention and have none of the rights of a prisoner of war, if captured. Just like Jean Laffite or Blackbeard, these killers have no permanent home unless they conquer one. Hence, pirates and piracy.). A subject into which the Committee enquired, was this: Who were the OTHER Saudi billionaires, who invested money to pay for the 9-11 Attacks?
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia threatened Congress and President Bush, that if the US published the names of the other Saudi billionaires who financed the attack, Saudi Arabia would dump $700 Billion worth of US Treasury bills onto the global bond market and sell them for as litlle as one dollar. This would collapse the US banking system and would take most of the world’s banks down with it. It was the financial equivalent of a nuclear attack.
The 9-11 Commission issued it’s report, but withheld 28 pages of testimony. The missing 28 pages, identify the other Saudi billionaires who sided with bin Laden and against the US…and also give details of the motives behind the attack (which are thought to involve a pipeline deal in Afghanistan that fell through.)
Over the past decade, the Federal Reserve has printed so much money, that it could now buy the $700 Billion that Saudi Arabia threatened to dump on the market.
Since there’s no longer the risk of a global financial catastrophe, why hasn’t Congress gone public with the missing 28 pages of 9-11 testimony?
Very good question indeed. Anytime debt (especially of that magnitude) is held by foreign governments, that foreign government essentially has a lien on your country. A nation can be your friend one year only to become an adversary the next year. Saudi Arabia had us by the balls. We owe China a ton of money. All because we insist on spending more than the income we take into the coffers each year. I don’t know as much about history as Bob does, but I do recall during World War II that American citizens purchased war bonds. That’s how we financed World War II. If America needs to raise money for extraordinary circumstances such as a war effort, it certainly makes sense that we would borrow from our own citizens in the form of Treasury bonds rather than take those bonds to the global market. Whomever you owe money to ends up being your master. Just as a family who insists upon living above their means can take out a second mortgage to finance their lifestyle may end up losing their home when they cannot make those payments. Another reason why runaway spending is very dangerous to our nation.
Something similar happens when CEOs and other high-level executives of a corporation are given huge bonuses for the performance of the company based upon one year’s financial results. Are the executives going to make decisions that are good for the long-term health of the Corporation? No, they have the incentive to be very short-sighted so they can earn their bonus for the year. Who cares about the following years? Those Executives may have moved on to a new company where they can do the same thing.
It is up to the American citizens to understand what a true surplus is, the importance of a balanced budget each and every year, the dangers of debt and the importance of having savings in reserve. To hold lawmakers and the executive branch responsible for short-sighted financial behavior and vote accordingly. North American voter and our elected officials have failed in their fiduciary duty.
BOTH the American voter…..