Keep the Sequester Cuts

We may need to clean house in Washington.  The politicians, on both sides of the aisle, appear to be ready  to restore the spending eliminated in the sequester.  How can they seriously deal with our budget and think of increasing spending?

We are already on a financial time bomb.  There is no way to diffuse it.  It is only a matter of time before our financial system collapses.  The politicians only hope that it will not happen on their watch.  Thus the perpetual kicking of the can down the road.  Addressing the real issue will be messy and politically unpopular.

Our other problem is the growing government.  Weekly we hear about more government intrusion in our lives.  Government interference may seem benign now, but the power of government can easily be turned for evil.  We have to stop government growth now.  It only grows because we let it.

A whole new slate of legislators might be the answer.

History in the Making

The lawmakers in the U.S. House now have the attention of the nation and the world, as they have scaled back the government.  We call it the "shut down."  Now the government spending is bumping up on the debt ceiling, and something has to be done.

This is a Hobson's choice.  If they raise the debt ceiling, we go further into debt.  We continue to add to the future troubles.  If they don't raise the ceiling, then they set in motion the financial catastrophe that has been building since the Reagan years.  There is no good way out of this.  They tell us that this is complicated.  In the details, it is.  In principle, it is as simple as a piggy bank.

Government is a monster that needs to be fed money.  It consumes money faster than we can earn it and mail it in.  It grows every year by design.  Some have grown tired of feeding the monster, wishing that it would be satisfied.

The next step may make history.

A Long Time to Pay Off the Debt

We are fooling ourselves if we think that we are ever going to pay off the U.S. national debt.  

What is the national debt, anyway?  Think of it this way.  Imagine that you get an allowance of $10 per week.  But you end up spending $11 per week.  You have a spending deficit of $1.  That extra money has to come from somewhere, so you borrow it from your sister.  After the first week, you owe her $1.  But you keep up that spending pattern, and every week you borrow another dollar from her.  After 12 weeks, you owe her $12.  That is your total debt, not including the interest you owe her.  You add up the deficits to determine your debt.

Our national deficits have recently been over $300 billion, and according to the National Debt Clock  our national debt is over $16.7 trillion dollars.  The numbers are so big that we can’t really understand them.  

Let’s put those numbers in perspective thinking of these numbers in terms of time.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. 

A million seconds is about 11.6 days.

A billion seconds is about 31.7 years.

A trillion seconds is 31,710 years.

The earliest records of human history date back about 5000 years.  So one trillion seconds is more than 6 times as long as human history.  History itself has not experienced a trillion seconds.

So, if the U.S. never borrowed another penny and began paying off the debt at a rate of a dollar per second, we would pay off the debt in about 529,557 years.  If we paid off the debt at a rate of $1000 per second, it would still take us over 529 years.

Another War?

The US looks determined to take on another war, this time in Syria.  It was terrible for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons on its population.  But we cannot be the world's police.

We are involved in numerous conflicts all around the globe, and have been for generations.  Unfortunately, many times politicians lead our country into war for political reasons.  Presidents grow in popularity when they start wars.  Thus, it takes very little rationalizing for presidents to lead us into war.

We interpret US national interests so broadly that virtually any excuse works to take us into war.

The American public allows this war mongering, not considering the problems with world-policing.  The more we intervene, the less moral authority we have.  The flimsier our excuses for war, the less moral authority we have.

Here we go again...

Healthcare Revealed

Universal healthcare was supposed to fix so many problems. Every day we now learn more reasons why it was too good to be true.

Today Delta Airlines announced that compliance with the law will cost them $100 million.  Government interference in the marketplace always has unintended consequences.

It amazes me that anyone is surprised at the debacle.  The legislation was rushed through with contrived urgency.  No one had a chance to read the bill thoroughly, much less debate or refine it.

No one could predict the effects of such far-reaching changes in the healthcare market.  But sending the industry into chaos has one clear benefit for power-hungry politicians:  government will be called in to straighten out the mess.

So government creates the mess, then charges in to fix the mess.  Seems like we have seen this pattern before.

The Other Side of the Story

All the protests and media reports about the Republican legislature in Raleigh have led the public to believe that our state government now works against the public good.  The tipping point seemed to be the treatment of our teachers and the education system.  All over Facebook I saw posts about the evil legislature gutting the education system and giving teachers the shaft.

I kept thinking there must be another side to the story.  No one would be so cold and heartless.  While the news media should have offered to provide the other perspective, I never saw one story explaining the Republican point of view.  It was like the whole party went behind locked doors to invent ways to subvert the will of the people.  The legislators were portrayed as out of touch, stubborn and stupid.

Then today I saw a link posted offering the other side of the story.  http://www.ncgop.org/nc-house-republicans-state-education-spending-the-facts/  Now granted, this comes from the Republicans, so it is politically motivated, but no more so than the complaints of the Democrats.

The Republicans let themselves be demonized by the media without effectively getting out their side of the story.

The media are also to blame, because they fail to answer the obvious question:  What could the Republicans possibly be thinking?

And the public should be ashamed for mindlessly buying the outlandish, biased reports from the media.

Don't We Know This Trick?

I have said for years that you can't lead people where they don't want to go.  I was wrong.  You can lead people where they don't want to go if you trick them and lie to them.  This is what tyrants have been doing throughout history. 

Right now our politicians are cleverly working to create civil unrest.  Economic disaster awaits the collapse of the dollar, and current policies have guaranteed more severe fallout ahead.  Politicians use the media and government agencies to create greater divides among us, along race and economic lines.  The health care law seizes control of a huge sector of our economy.  College loans are now all handled by the federal government, making indebted students slaves to the state.

When everything falls apart, it will require more government intervention, perhaps even martial law.  The public will cry out for more government control to help settle the upheaval in society.  The government will be more than willing to use the heavy hand to control the population.

Here is the trick:  use government policies to create unrest in society, then let government swoop in to save the day with even more control.  What's the definition of tyranny?