Posted on 11/10/2009 7:36:35 AM PST by AJKauf
I think we’ve all been broke before. Large men come and break your thumbs and threaten your family, and then you hide out in a dumpster until it all blows over. That’s all well and good for an individual, but what happens if our entire country goes broke?
Robert J. Samuelson raised this concern in the Washington Post, and it got me worried, even though I didn’t quite understand it all (which perhaps actually increases the worry). We can’t just hide America in a dumpster (and even if we could, I bet that goody-two-shoes Canada would rat us out); we need a real plan for if the U.S. were to go broke. So is this a real concern?
I believe so. Our president loves spending money. He just loves it. Now, he’s really smart — much smarter than even a border collie — but I just don’t think he understands basic economics. His solution to everything is “Let’s spend more money on a giant new government program!” And while he’s spending the money, he has this big, happy “I’m spending money!” smile on his face. It’s adorable. That’s why I don’t think anyone has the heart to tell him we don’t have any money left to spend. Think of the sad frowny face he’d make if he was told he couldn’t spend any more money; we’d all be heartbroken.
Still, with America going broke, it’s a huge problem. Just the other day, Obama heard some people don’t have health care, so he was like, “We need a giant new government program to get everyone health care!” People even told him, “But that will cost a lot of money.” But Obama said, “No, it will save us money!” And when people asked how, Obama said, “Because of these magic beans...
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
“Ignorance is curable, but stupid is permanent.”
You speak as if you have personal experience. LOL
I’m somewhat agree with you and Rush. I do believe Obama is destroying the country on purpose but is also dumb to believe in doing so it will lead to a perfect state.
I have a liberal friend( more like frienemy) who thinks Obama should do everything he’s doing and more. She thinks spending us to an oblivion is the answer. She says it’s common sense and we conservatives don’t have a clue. Nevermind this frienemy and her husband spent their own money into oblivion and just filed for bankruptcy. They are getting bailed out but she fails to see no one will bail us out or that we could go bankrupt!
Talk about no common sense!!
“You are delusional?”
No need in posting personal insults...
I have my opinion and you have yours...
You can wave the “white flag” if you so desire but on the 234th Birthday of my United States Marine Corps, I will continue to fight.
Good day.
This was amusing, but I would like to see an honest assessment of what the high deficit means to the average American. I know that it would mean that credit would be much more difficult to get. Foreign goods and raw materials would be expensive.
If?
Good advice, have been living in SW Texas for a few years now and can speak it pretty good.
He’s really smart — much smarter than even a border collie,I question that!.
“Ignorance is curable, but stupid is permanent...
eight years of Slick?”
“Under the Newt-designed contract, the Republicans pledged to give the average American family major tax relief, cut taxes substantially for investors, make wholesale changes in the welfare system and balance the budget. Less than six weeks later, the American voters, enraged by Clintonomics (plus his big push for gays in the military), handed the Democrats a historic defeat.
The Republicans not only captured the Senate, but won a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years, enthroning Gingrich as speaker. Thus, the Clinton effort to socialize a huge chunk of America had been seriously blunted. Clinton’s economic policy, as pursued from 1992 through 1994, was over. How, then, can Clinton be given credit for an economic program that was largely thwarted? The simple answer: He can’t.
Aware that his first two years had been a disaster (even though he inherited an expanding economy, according to his own Office of Management and Budget), a panicky Clinton brought in Dick Morris to rescue his presidency. Morris instructed Clinton, as described in Morris’s Behind the Oval Office, to “[W]ork to eliminate the deficit, require work for welfare, cut taxes and reduce the federal bureaucracy.” That is, govern conservatively.
Clinton Tacks Right
Clinton, though kicking and screaming all the way, eventually embraced Morris’s advice. By the spring of 1995, the President had abandoned Hillarycare for good and was proposing balanced budgets. Then he declared at an October 17 fundraiser in Houston, Texas, that “I think I raised them [taxes] too much, too.”
But Clinton’s rhetorical surrender to the center and the right was not yet complete. In his 1996 State of the Union address, he made the grand pronouncement that “the era of Big Government is over.” Clinton then acquiesced in a series of important Republican initiatives, putting some substance behind the oratory.
In election year 1996, he signed, reluctantly and with liberals raging in opposition, a historic GOP welfare reform program, eliminating scores of federal welfare regulations and transferring critical spending authority to the states. The initial results — which Clinton hailed at the Democratic Convention in 2000 — were spectacular, with caseloads’ falling like stones within just a couple of years.
Clearly, Republicans had gotten this area of public policy right and Clinton was quietly tipping his hat to them while loudly seizing credit for the program’s stunning success.
More Clinton concessions were to come. The President in August of 1997 signed into law a bipartisan balanced-budget measure that not only restrained spending, but also included several critical Republican tax-relief items, including a solid, middle-class tax cut, a pledge the President had crawfished on after his ’92 election.
The GOP-sponsored cut came in the form of a $500-per-child tax credit — courtesy mainly of the lobbying of pro-family activist Gary Bauer — which would amount to about $75 billion over a five-year period and prove a godsend to millions of American families.
The measure also contained substantial tax relief elsewhere: a nearly 30% cut in the capital gains tax burden, a serious decrease in estate taxes, repeal of the alternative minimum tax on small business and a new retirement savings account, known as the Roth IRA. Clinton had now gotten around to embracing many of the very same proposals promised in the “Contract” and served up by the first Gingrich Congress in 1995. In the meantime, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had been keeping interest rates relatively low, thus giving another boost to the country’s economic success.
Equally important, the Republicans weren’t imposing on the country — or even threatening to impose — the kind of dangerous domestic spending and regulatory programs that can wreak economic havoc. “What proved critical,” says former Congressional Budget Office Director, June O’Neill, “was the absence of legislation that meddled with the economy or that had major, long-run spending consequences on the budget.”
The result of all this? The economy bloomed. Money flowed into the U.S. Treasury, largely because people were becoming wealthier. Revenues from income and capital gains taxes were soaring, not because rates were being raised but because rates were being lowered. Spending was restrained, GDP was rising at a healthy 4% clip and the Dow average had more than tripled by the time Clinton left office — and has managed to maintain these stratospheric heights, largely because of the Bush tax cuts.
The Ronald Reagan peace dividend, with an assist from George H.W. Bush, also proved crucial in generating the surpluses the Democrats keep bragging about. Even Clinton’s Defense team has acknowledged this truth.
According to John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Clinton, and Clinton Defense Secretary William J. Perry (Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2000): “This ‘peace dividend,’ amounting to about $100 billion a year, has been a major contributor to the balanced budget that our economy now enjoys.”
In other words, the economy that Bill Clinton and the Democrats take credit for had soared due to conservative Republican economic principles and a Reagan-engineered peace dividend. But Bill and the Democrats keep pretending that they invented this “Goldilocks” economy. The truth, of course, is different.”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=28661
“Four years of Jimmah?
Four years of “Jimmah” was the best thing to happen to the GOP because it gave us 8 years of Ronald Reagan.
If the contributions fail to balance the budget, the loss of political payoffs should have an ameliorative effect.
The dimocrats will never go away. 50 percent of the people in America pay no income tax. The dims have created electoral perfection. Those 50 percent have just enough intelligence to figure out that the dims give them the handouts. George Soros then funds the dimocrats to keep America enslaved. We are on the road to fascism and/or civil war. The world today looks frighteningly similar to 1914 in that cataclysmic change is coming and not the change for which dim Americans voted.
LOL. Priceless.
Well said! You articulated my opinion in this post perfectly.
You make some good points BUT the majority of the clowns who make up that 50% who depend on the gov’t for their livelihood are too lazy to get up off the couch and vote...the GOP Congress & Clinton got “workfare” passed and balanced the Budget in the 90’s; we just need to “take out the trash” in D.C. and around the country, secure the borders and deport ALL foreign muzzies & illegal aliens including the incarcerated!
We would have to pull back our military, cut benefits to all government employees, default on much of our debt, probably raise taxes (if so, hopefully on consumption to encourage savings), etc. I’m guessing by then the dollar would be gone, but if not we would still need a restructuring of our monetary system. My vote would be for much harder currency and the abolition of legal tender laws. We would lose world reserve currency status for sure. It wouldn’t be pretty, but the long term effects would probably be very beneficial, assuming we survived the short term.
I made no comment on the opportunities that Jimmah and Slick afforded to the Republicans.
Maybe that was not completely unambiguous.
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