Let It Burn – is US bankruptcy inevitable?

May 15, 2010 10:12


If Republicans take control of the House and Senate, and if they repeal the health care bill, then they will not be able (or likely even try) to reform Medicare or Social Security. These programs alone will bankrupt our nation.

By Demosthenes at American Thinker

For the past hundred years, America has been slowly moving away from the principles of its founding. The ideals of liberty, individual achievement, limited government, and the equality of opportunity have been slowly supplanted by calls for security, class warfare, excessive regulation, and the equality of outcome. The passage of stimulus acts, bailouts, government takeovers of two U.S. automakers, and the health care overhaul prove that our movement away from 1776 has accelerated.

Passage of the health care bill has sparked a revival of small-government thinking, causing many to predict significant Republican gains in Congress this fall. But despite some short-term success, this small-government revival is doomed to fail. The depressing truth is that the only way to regain the full measure of those freedoms proclaimed in our Founding Documents is for our current federal government to completely collapse under the weight of its own excesses.

Often, one carefully articulated analogy can succinctly convey a very complex idea. In our case, that analogy is addiction. Over the past hundred years, we have slowly allowed a monstrous system of dependence to develop until nearly every citizen relies upon government money, and thus is an addict. This has come about because the hard logic of the Founders has been replaced by the seductive ease of emotional arguments. All too often, the debate is over not if government should do something, but what it should do. This almost imperceptible shift in our national philosophy is a manifestation of our addiction.

While the citizen-addict is hooked on government largesse, the politician-addict is hooked on something far more sinister: power. Their drug is available in Washington, D.C. Just as a dealer will go to any length to continue selling his wares, politicians will stop at nothing to retain their power. These two groups of addicts are locked in mutual co-dependence, where the politician-addict seeking re-election buys off the citizen-addict with more spending. Then the citizen-addict, seeking yet another free lunch from Washington, reelects the politician-addict. The result is endless, ever-expanding government programs and our current fiscal nightmare.

The persistence of these programs has nothing to do with their success. They continue because we are more concerned that our actions are deemed compassionate than whether our programs are actually successful. If we truly wanted to help people save for retirement, we would not establish a program with a meager 1.23% rate of return while simultaneously supporting a monetary policy of systematic inflation. Yet these and other ineffective or even counterproductive programs continue. Such willful blindness to economic reality cannot be sustained indefinitely. The Congressional Budget Office has recently stated that our national debt will constitute 90% of our gross domestic product — that is 20.3 trillion dollars — in just ten years. What is even more shocking is that these debt numbers do not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security, which currently rest at 107 trillion dollars. Sadly, this trend cannot be stopped.

FULL STORY



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