Posted on 12/10/2004 9:42:59 AM PST by HostileTerritory
Take it from a not-so-old former congressman who knows: Proud young Americans, you are in for a con job from Washington that you can't even imagine.
Your government has already borrowed almost $8 trillion that it can't pay back. Guess who will have to write the check? That's right. You.
Expect massive tax hikes in your future, and wicked cuts in national defense, education, environmental enforcement, police protection and medical care for the poor and elderly.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
ping
People are coming at this from fascinating angles. Should have had this conversation 20 years ago.
Didn't Proud Young Americans sing "She Drives Me Crazy"?
He actually praises a Krugman article in his rant, that we are all stupid.
What interests me is that Scarborough wrote this a day or two after his old colleague Alan Boyd, a Democrat who represents the district in Florida next to Joe's, came out in support of Bush's proposals.
I've given up trying to get a grasp on which way Joe Scarborough is leaning politically, from one day to the other.
Or temporary tolls...
You may have missed it, but this has been going on , and "spoken" about for much more than twenty years.
It has been spoken of as the "third rail of politics".
Seeing the quality of Congress, do you wonder why it has been avoided?
What the hell, that "dummy" Ross Perot explained that to the world, and in very elementary language. ;)
They are trying to scare people into moving lots of money into Social Security from other places ASAP. No one has the courage to come up with a plan to shut it down, in stages, over time. And it would be possible. Increase retirement age immediately, grandfather in cessation of SS deductions from pay, cut other social spending to pay back those who paid in earlier, etc. Tough medicine and sure to cause all sorts of bitching. Would need to essentially play major hardball with pork and with bread and circuses. Would need to sell the squishy middle on cuts, ala Reagan. Can be done, courage required.
Have no idea who Boyd is or his voting record. Is he one of the few yellow dog democrats. Could be since he represents a district in the panhandle of Florida.
Or, we could demolish most of this debt by a little bookkeeping sleight-of-hand.
Devaluate the dollar, so this debt incurred in fairly expensive dollars today is paid back with cheap and plentiful dollars tomorrow. Or even cheaper and more plentiful dollars the day after tomorrow. Of course, that will make today's debt, expressed in trillions, be expressed in quadrillions, and a very generous value applied to energy content of practically every finished product sold in this coutry.
Time was, a man had $5,000 in the bank and the real estate he had paid for in full, he and his wife could live out their years in a fair degree of affluence. Even if his widow survived him by ten years.
Now half a million wouldn't be able to assure that.
He's more of a blue dog than a yellow dog. He's not as conservative as someone like Gene Taylor or Ralph Hall, because he only came to the House about 10 years ago and represents all the state government employees, so it's a bit surprising he decided not to mau mau Bush on the issue.
But he's definitely at what passes for the conservative end of today's Democrats.
Government gone wild. No matter who is in power, by the way. It's unfixable but extendable at this point. It's only a matter of time until the collapse of the whole damn thing.
I just wish I could keep my books like the US and UN do to prepare for it.
like ta whine about that 2 trillion transition cost, but isn't that just 2 trillion that somebody has to pay anyway at some point in the form of current taxes to current recievers?...and isn't the long term liability if nothing is done somewhere around 27 trillion?...seems to me there are 3 kinds of people in this world, and the other 2 are starting to p*ss me off.
I'm 45, and NOBODY is going to have any money if we don't stabalise the problem by getting the money out of the hands of the gub'mint who spend it, and into the hands of the people who invest it. And the way to fix it is grow the economy big enough that the tax income grows, and channel some of that tax income back into the funds they ripped off to pay for The (less than) Great Society.
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