Federal Spending Like There's No Tomorrow

There are no political consequences for doing so and there will be no political consequences so long as there is no pain.

Great points, all.

Like all past "empires" ours is turning into a gluttonous swamp filled with swamp creatures who care little about future/consequences, only about their own here and now.

Sheeple are put to sleep with "entertainment" and a(deliberately engineered)false sense of security. Knowledge would cause social instability, can't have that while the gluttonous are enjoying the fruits of their fraud, therefore the apparatus has been put in place to make sure that "knowledge" among the serfs never happens.

We have our own home-grown saboteurs who do things out of their own greed, but our(foreign)enemies sense blood in the water and will do what it takes to hasten the destruction by adding their own poison pills to the well.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

One has to wonder if we've been "programmed" to do nothing, because even with the small bit of information we DO have(about debt, greed and evil)we do nothing...letting creatures like Soros and a corrupt political/corporate class still breathe and thrive.

As we search for a solution within the system we have, it may be impossible. Consider what one is up against ... the following paragraphs in a book about the Federal Reserve that I am reading ...by H.S. Kenan The Federal Reserve Bank 1966.

“The first great turning was accomplished with the ease of a Pullman train passing from one track to another over a split-point switch. The landscape hardly changed at all for a while, and then gradually, and when people found themselves in a new political region, there was no turning back.

The event was the amendment to the Constitution in 1913, giving the federal government power to impose a progressive tax on all income. This idea was not only European, it was Marxian, one of the cardinal points of the Communist Manifesto. President Wilson disarmed the opposition by saying the federal government would use this power , if at all, only in time of emergency, and yet, as we now know, the obsequies of limited government ought then to have been performed. Only intellectuals knew what it meant. Nobody else dreamed, least of all perhaps President Wilson, that the Federal income tax would be used not for revenue only, which was until then the only kind of taxation Americans knew, but for the purpose of redistributing the national wealth from the top downward, according to European ideas of social amelioration.”

Call me a optimist, I don’t think it’s impossible. Yes, we passed the 13th amendment and the chances of ever repealing it are slim to none. So instead of continuing to put or children and grandchildren into debt let’s start paying for the programs Americans want.

The way we do this is one at a time. Social security is, in my opinion the best place to start with the most likely political chance of passing. We simply get rid of the cap on the amount of income subject to the social security tax and add a maximum benefit amount. This would affect roughly 10% of Americans but from the numbers I’ve seen it would get us over the baby boomer hump and then start reducing the deficit again.

You are optimistic, and pragmatic. In addition eliminating the income threshold and capping the maximum benefit, increasing the age at the lower and upper end should be considered given demographics. But this fix, as the others before it, ... one merely is buying time as the system cannot be sustained as designed, then has morphed (consider 10 million plus on SS disability) into something else (including many persons’ primary or only retirement benefit).

The fundamental problem is as I noted earlier, the 16th Amendment set the stage for wealth transfer/redistribution. The Great Depression was the defining crisis that allowed FDR to put it into action. Politicians are “addicted” to it; too many citizens have been bought off thinking that they are getting something for nothing as they continue to re-elect those promising to keep sending scraps their way. As I read elsewhere, the 16th Amendment granted unlimited freedom to the government, and took away the freedoms of the citizens to whom the government was once subservient. A high school graduate, regular guy, Vietnam vet told me 40 years ago while working at a truck stop,... nothing ever really gets done in the US until a major crisis occurs, and what comes out of it probably won’t be the right answer to the crisis.

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