Congressional Spending Goes Full Weimar

It has become a speculative game in the blogosphere to predict what black swan calamities could lead to a breakdown in civil order and the imposition of some form of martial law. Wars and rumors of war abound. We have already seen a container ship mysteriously knocking down a bridge and closing a key port. Other such scenarios include massive cyber-attacks that shut down the grid and block communication and transportation networks nationwide. The speculation on the variations of such events is virtually endless.

However, one crisis is no black swan and is entirely expected, already happening, and growing in scale by the day. That would be the ballooning debt crisis. If Washington does not change its free-spending ways, the debt will become a catastrophe of devastating proportions that will tear the nation apart. So long as Congress continues its multi-trillion-dollar deficit spending, we will have a financial death spiral, similar to events a century ago in the Weimar Republic of Germany.

The total discretionary spending for the U.S. government in Fiscal Year 2024 is approximately $1.70 trillion. This amount is split between $886 billion for defense and $688 billion for non-defense programs. In the fiscal year, the U.S. government is also projected to spend approximately $4.19 trillion on mandatory programs. These programs include interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and other programs. We have an annual structural deficit in excess of $2 trillion that will soon grow exponentially.

Congress needs to get serious about reducing spending. For starters, they should outright eliminate the Departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy. All other departments will need cuts as well. But that is not happening, and instead, they waste money on frivolous services benefiting illegal immigrants and abortion facilities. Notable allocations...

I was talking to an RCA engineer back in the day, say around 1976. Super smart EE back when RCA was an amazing brain trust in Indianapolis. I was in an Explorer Scout troop.

We visited some of the coolest places because of the interest, motivation and connections of this engineer. He was or is a fantastic person.

We met a retired ham engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project (several of those dudes settled in Indiana back then). Saw a HUGE coal electrical plant on the SW side of Indianapolis. Amazing. Saw Indianapolis's ATC for the FAA.

Saw a prototype of RCA's laser disc... a tour de force engineering marvel that encoded video on a groove on a disc, like an audio LP, but with a million times more information. This was before DVDs or CDs.

Where am I going with this? Simply to say that, in spite of the tremendous education and erudition of people like my friend the RCA engineer, people from 1910 on in the United States were raised on a bunch of Keynesian garbage and lies. Keynes was a Communist who captured everyone's attention and even until today, if you go to any college anywhere and take Macroeconomics E102, you are going to get a pantload of Keynesian economic theory, which consists of one and only one thing:

It is perfectly OK for a government to print money and spend it to buy votes and other things, and it is OK to forget about any consequences of that phony money. Even though that fiat money was never associated with any services provided or goods shipped, it is perfectly OK to print it and spend it if you are a government. And it is OK as a nation to spend yourself into complete and total debt, equaling several times your annual GDP, and it does not matter at all. It is not like debt you owe to a real bank or person or mobster, where the consequences of not paying back the loan are severe. Everyone KNOWS it would be a complete disaster for an individual or a household to go into even an amount of debt equaling 25 % of annual household income (home mortgages excluded, um, but should they be?), but a country can do it, and it is perfectly OK. OK?

No, Keynes taught that debt spent by the government was just an academic concept, having no bearing on reality, and it never accumulated, it just vanished up into the air and sky and space, never to be seen again. You could spend all the government money you wanted and there would never, ever, be any consequences at all. "Just an academic concept," my friend would say. "Let it run up! It just doesn't matter!"

Well the problem is the communists who took over the Education establishment have successfully convinced EVERY SWINGING d*ck in the US that the above Keynesian lie is true. And everyone sincerely believes it. And will believe it until it takes a wheelbarrow full of US dollars to buy a stick of Juicy Fruit. And even then our Congress will still be funding some space program for transsexuals to have book reading hours on the moon for kids.

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