US Government Makes Me Embarassed To Be An American
October 9, 2007
Here’s what’s going on in Washington (D.C.) right now. Democrats are trying to pass their twelve spending bills. Bush has pledged to veto any bills with excessive spending because of our huge deficit, even though he didn’t veto the ones the Republicans passed with huge deficits. Some Republicans are jumping ship, not because they think it’s the right thing to do, but because they don’t want to lose votes. And state and local governments all want to get as much money from the government as possible.
Currently there is a 22-billion dollar chasm between what Bush wants and what the Democrats want. As a result, emergency spending bills have been passed to keep the government running until November 16. There are a few things about this whole mess that I find truly wrong:
1) Every single state and local government seems to feel like they are “entitled” to a piece of the federal government pie. Nevermind that we are running a massive deficit, they just want their money.
2) Democrats seem to be okay with running massive deficits. They were even willing to raise the debt limit back in March.
3) Bush is right that we should not be running a massive deficit. But the current one is his fault. He slashed taxes and ignored pork spending as ran unprecedent deficits for 6 years with a Republican Congress. And the 22-billion dollars he’s quibbled with the Democrats over is essentially meaningless on top of a 9 trillion dollar debt (each citizen’s share is about 29,000 dollars). Oh, and he invaded Iraq unnecessarily, and that’s costing several hundred billion dollars a year.
What really embarasses me is that we are running a 9 trillion dollar debt with no political desire anywhere to balance the budget. Considering we have a 13 trillion dollar economy, that is a dangerously high amount. Additionally, an increasing amount of our debt is being purchased by our countries, especially China. As a result, the dollar is plummetting, as is American economic superiority.
The national debt is currently going up by 1.48 billion dollars a day. But that’s not the worst part. Baby boomers are going to be hitting 65 really soon. And even though life expectancy is in the 80’s, retirement, Social security, and Medicare still kick in at 65. Entitlement programs already dominate the budget. If we can’t balance the budget now, what exactly are we going to do when the cost of our entitlement programs double?
And to top it off we each own $30,000 of that debt, but of course it is much more than that because that’s per person, not per household, and you know the rich will find ways to avoid paying their part of it.
Daniel:
It’s even worse than that. That’s $30,000 per person just on the principal balance. If you know anything about compounding interest, that actually amounts to FAR, FAR more across our lifetimes, and our children’s lifetimes, and our children’s children’s lifetimes.
The US is mortgaging its future in a power grab that can only fail.
In other words, we’re screwed.
Nearly 50% of the national budget goes to Social Security. Cut Social Security! Cut it now. That will fix the problem. It’s not going to be there when I retire anyway thanks to the greedy baby boomers.
Did you see that article in USA today with the first baby boomer to collect Social Security? She was doing the interview from her BOAT! Why should we subsidize her boat with our rent money?
Yeah, the Chinese are going to be PISSED when the US government defaults on the several trillion dollars of our debt they own.
If the US actually defaulted on its debt to foreign countries the global economic system as we know it would be in shambles. Congress raises the debt limit quite often to prevent this from happening.
As for Bush finally wielding the veto, better late than never. It most definitely is his fault and the fault of a republican run congress that our deficit is what it is now. This is one thing that actually scares me about 2008. A democrat will most likely win the presidential election, so that threat of a veto will all but disappear. As I’ve said many times in many places, anyone who thought that the democrats taking back control of Congress was going to change anything was kidding themselves.
Congress raising the debt limit will have little effect if our foreign creditors suddenly decide to call in the debt. At which point, the US has one of two choices:
1. Default on the debt, and find itself unable to ever again get loans from other countries, or
2. Attempt to pay the debt and crush the nation in the process.
There’s no alternative. At some point, China will find it strategically advantageous to call in that debt. Good luck to us when they do. They want to own the world and they’re not going to do it with soldiers; they’re going to do it by beating us at our own game.
Mark, I have to disagree with you. The Dems are trying to right the sinking ship that is our government. But they have an extremely slim margin in the Senate (Lieberman is on Bush’s side, without him they only have 50 votes), and Bush threatens to veto anything they do. If we had a Democrat in the big house we actually be able to accomplish something. We sure as hell did the last time a Clinton was running the show.