Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Borrow, Spend, Collapse


Gas prices are going up. Food prices are going up. Unemployment is going up. The national debt is going up. Earnings for most Americans are either going down or are stagnant. There are fewer and fewer high-paying manufacturing jobs because the federal government has allowed companies to move factories overseas where people work for less, then ship their products back without paying protective tariffs. Nice for them, but tough for working people here. At the same time, feds look the other way while millions of illegal aliens pour over our southern border to either work cheap and drive down wages, or to go on every form of public assistance and drive up government spending still further.From Gateway Pundit

This is serious. Most people know it cannot go on much longer or everything will collapse. Some voted for President Obama because they believed the “hope and change” rhetoric, but regret it now. Many formed into Tea Party groups all over the country and took over the US House of Representatives. They’re looking for a 2012 presidential candidate who has courage enough to tell the American people that we have to put all this into reverse and that it’s going to be painful for millions of us, but that there’s no other way to avoid complete collapse.

Trouble is, there are millions of other Americans who have allowed themselves to become dependent on government handouts of one form or another. Some of them know the gravy train cannot go on forever and entitlements must be cut, but they’ll only support cutting the programs other people use, not the ones they use. Few would support politicians who would cut across the board. Do these government addicts comprise a majority? It’s close, and we’ll just have to see. If they do, America as we’ve known it will cease to exist. The country our children and grandchildren grow up in will be vastly different. The “can-do” America will have irreversibly transformed into the “I-can’t-do-it” America that expects government to do it instead.From Joshua Kennon

The federal government spends three dollars for every two it gets in taxes. It has already borrowed so much that interest payments are about as high as our defense budget, and most of those in Congress want to raise the debt limit and borrow still more. When our Chinese creditors balk at lending any more money, government just prints it. The US Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke has increased the money supply by well over a trillion dollars in the past few years. Every dollar it prints makes the ones in all of our wallets and in all of our bank accounts less valuable. This “quantitative easing” as Bernanke calls it, is just another way government takes money from us - and from everyone else in the world whose assets are in dollars. That’s why other countries want to abandon the dollar and use some other as a base currency.From Washington Post

At supermarkets and gas stations, most people use credit cards. If they can’t pay off their balances each month, they realize they’re going further into debt and they have to cut back in some way or the interest will kill them. Either it’s driving less, getting a smaller vehicle, changing the way they eat, or whatever - they must cut back or their household will eventually collapse.

We’ve all known irresponsible relatives and neighbors who have ignored this reality and fallen apart. Now we see our government - and many of our states - doing the same thing and taking us all down with it. If a credible candidate shows up on the scene with the courage to run on a platform of drastically cutting government - including entitlements - he or she will move into the White House.

If not, we’ll continue on the road to ruin.

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