Posted on 02/09/2012 5:55:20 PM PST by blam
The Collapse Of America In Raw Numbers *Video*
Mac Slavo
February 9th, 2012
Looking at the numbers behind our federal budgets reveals that the majority of our government’s spending goes not to running the day to day operations of government, but rather, to social safety net programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, welfare, food assistance, rental stipends and a host of other entitlement programs. In many cases, the programs themselves are used as a marketing tool during election campaigns, with the winner of an election often being the candidate who promises the most benefits to their constituents.
While this strategy of indirect vote buying has worked well for politicians on both sides of the aisle for many decades, and has been instrumental in ushering in an era of centrally planned economies and expansion of government influence on the individual lives of American citizens, it is as Bill Whittle suggests (video below), an unsustainable system that will ultimately fail.
It’s generally true that the people who receive the most in benefits pay little or nothing in taxes, so people are voting themselves other peoples’ money. It’s not just a vote pump. It’s a wealth redistribution pump, and it pumps $2.2 trillion every single year from people who work and pay taxes to people who often don’t work and don’t pay any taxes.
As long as the benefit receivers can outvote the benefit producers there will be more and more people taking, and fewer and fewer people working harder and harder to produce those benefits. That’s exactly what we’re seeing today.
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(Please click to the site to see the video)
We face a choice. One option is to cut back on this [entitlement] food supply and gradually but firmly reduce this entitlement dependence to what it was originally intended to be: help for those, who through illness or physical incapacity, cannot help themselves, and return everyone else feeding on this supply from the wealth consumer column to the wealth generator column. That is going to be very, very, very difficult to do.
Or, we can let this continue until the system collapses, and that’ll be sooner rather than later, and much sooner than many of you think. Then there won’t be any benefits at all.
There is certainly something to be said for the ethical and moral obligations of an advanced modern-day society with respect to taking care of those who cannot care for themselves, or those who have experienced a short-term medical or employment emergency. But providing extended womb-to-tomb safety nets and entitlement programs for those who are perfectly capable of working a productive job but refuse to do so, or for those who make poor personal budgetary choices, leads to the inevitable outcome in which everyone eventually realizes that they’d be better off by simply collecting their income from the government.
We are at the point in America where there really is no turning back. While Mr. Whittle’s solution of drastically cutting back these types of nanny-state expenses is a sound one, it is simply not politically feasible for individual politicians. In today’s America, the idea of cutting back on social expenditures and facilitating a return to individual responsibility is political suicide for incumbents, and a non-starter for those wishing to enter the political arena as first time candidates.
Moreover, eliminating these types of expenses is simply not going to be possible without massive social upheaval. Consider what would happen if you cut supplemental food assistance by 50%, or eliminated extensions of emergency unemployment insurance, or, heaven forbid, you take away access to the millions of Obama Phones that will be distributed this year.
We are now so far gone that entitlement cuts to the federal budget will have the same catastrophic impact on society as will the eventual collapse of the monetary, financial and economic systems when our creditors finally stop lending us money. It’s a catch 22 and both options lead to the same end result. Thus, for Congressional representatives who control our budget, the choice is simple: kick the can down the road to keep the system from completely destabilizing for as long as possible.
When the money runs out – and it will, because China, Russia, Japan and the rest of our lenders know we’re a lost cause – the entitlement system in America will fall apart, leaving tens of millions of people without any way to meet their basic needs.
Once this new paradigm becomes apparent you can fully expect riots in the streets - bloodshed, starvation, martial law – all of the worst case scenarios you’ve imagined.
The system is coming unhinged and the math is all the proof you need.
I think one to five is a good guess. The are, of course, many variables, one of which is how long the EU can hold out and what effect that would have on us if they go first. If we go, everybody goes.
A prediction?
Once the wheels come off(1-5 years), American Socialism will vanish as quickly as Soviet Communism - mere months will pass before natural human society renews itself by throwing off the socialist burdens.
Who knows what shape the future will take, but socialism is doomed, in the US no less than elsewhere. The illusion that the state can create a better society through the gifting of public goods to the population will be broken.
I figured your question was rhetorical because there is no way to know when the wheels will come off. There is one camp that thinks it will be sudden and abrupt - like a run on banks. There is another camp that thinks we are the frog in a pot of warming water and it’s boiling.
There are too many variables.
As long as our bonds sell in the world market we can coast along increasing our debt until nobody will buy it.
As long as the dollar is the world currency everyone has a vested interest in our economic survival until an alternative is found.
etc etc.
We all agree that this level of government spending is unsustainable and the projections are frightening. Remember this, the calculations they base their estimates on assume a level of economic growth based on past years when the economy was much more healthy. The reality is that we are sinking faster than ever with government expenditures going through the roof. Remember the debt ceiling crisis and debate? Do the research on how long raising the ceiling was supposed to buy us..... we have reached it again. The proposed savings to pay for the debt increase were projected over 10 years assuming good economic performance.
When it happens is anyone’s best guess. I just know that there is no stomach for shared sacrifice in this country anymore and no true leadership because anyone who tells the truth will be replaced with someone who gives people what they want.
I would urge you and yours to start preparing now and don’t worry about a date because anyone that answers is giving you a guess.....
You mean the one we're in now? The government is spending almost twice what our revenues are and the Fed is having to make up 90% of that shortfall because no one is buying our bonds.
There will be many events that occur or markers to point at as the world economies spiral down to some level far below our current standard of living.
Better questions might be where will the bottom be and when. As far as cannibalism, I don't think we'll have to worry about that until maybe next winter. :)
” - - - The only question is, how long do we have? “
The answer is up until the moment that the National Debt Bubble bursts, if present conditions continue.
There is no conspiracy; the “Euro-Americans” are doing the same as Europeans, refusing to sacrifice for a next generation (the soul of socialism) then whining when they are surrounded by Third World imports brought in to stave off a declining population (a la Japan). Rather than reaping what they sowed when they’re 90 years old (or gone), they are seeing the fruit of their actions when they are 30 or 40 years old instead.
As long as a new car is more important than a new baby, there is no hope for them demographically. My children attend schools where at least half of the children have parents born elsewhere (as is their mother/my wife), and frankly I’d rather they be in that family-oriented environment than the yuppie type where their classmates have no siblings or progressive single mothers.
In a January 24, 2011 interview, Sen. Santorum said the United States is in need of more foreign workers. “I do think we need more people coming to this nation who want to be Americans to grow this economy. You want to fix the Social Security problem? Let’s have more workers producing and helping out the situation.... For me, I’m willing to allow increased immigration to this country...”
“It’s hard to put together a cogent explanation for it being a conspiracy. Who in a collective sense, over the period of 5 decades or so, would benefit from it?”
The beneficiaries are those who need an increasing population for their “industry”; retailers, the housing market, the government service providers (teachers, cops, etc.) - they all need “customers” (regardless of those customers’ means to pay - they’ll take it from others instead). What would happen to public school teachers as a population ages and flees their costs? Schools would close, and many infantile people with no marketable skills would be off the government dole and out of “work”. They’ll have class sizes of 5 students each before they let that happen, unless someone like Governor Christie comes in and forces the layoffs for financial reasons (no money left to pay them, and limiting how much they can suck from the taxpayers). Here in NJ we’ve also had mass layoffs of policemen, and in most cases they were in areas where Americans had conceded whole neighborhoods/cities to illegal aliens (read: non-taxpayers); for years they kept those police forces staffed on the backs of state taxpayers, but again, the money is gone, and our governor has capped how much they can screw us out of.
Most of these cops and teachers will have to look for work in other states; those fields won’t be hiring in significant numbers for decades in NJ, and they have no transferrable skills to contibute in our dwindling private sector (which has been ravaged by the previous decades of paying for these cops and teachers).
Something like this, perhaps.
later read
Here is a previously posted article by Selco:
A Survival Q & A: Living Through SHTF In The Middle Of A War Zone
Placemark
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