The Problem: High Debt, Not Low Debt Ceiling

            As I write, there looms what we are told by our political and economic masters is a looming economic crisis, unless we raise to $16.7 trillion or so the nation’s debt ceiling (that’s $16,700,000,000,000, boys and girls). Here’s where we stand:

            Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Friday declared House Speaker Boehner’s Bill - purportedly an attempt to deal responsibly with the problem - dead on arrival in the Senate. Yet to date Reid has failed to pass a Bill of his own (probably a good thing). 


            Back at the White House ranch, our feckless Community Organizer-In-Chief broods. The “Enlightened One” who swept into office three years ago promising to bring us together and move beyond the acrimony of the past, now presides over an even more bitterly divided nation whose divisions and acrimony he himself has exacerbated. Even now he engages in an unseemly blame game, pointing fingers all round and hectoring Congressional Republicans and members of the Tea Party, while all the while failing to lead by, among other things, presenting a plan of his own. His current approval rate is an all-time low of 40%; 34% among Independents. The peevishness of this most radical of Presidents may, ironically, be attributable to this most bourgeois of reasons: the perceived crisis has caused the Great Golfer to miss his regular tee-times.

            Of course, one must question whether there really is a crisis, or, if one determines that there is, whether it might actually be a salubrious to pass through one. As I observed earlier in the week: 

“I’ve noticed that many of the "prudent" establishment types now criticizing the influence of the Tea Party and warning Americans of dire consequences should we fail to raise the debt ceiling are people who depend upon government themselves. I’ve also noticed that they are many of the same people who have been propagating many of the wrong-headed predictions that have worked against the common good since the end of WW II, such as: that Soviet Communism is morally equivalent to democratic capitalism and is here to stay; that the Berlin Wall is never coming down in our lifetime so we need to make the best deal we can with Communist regimes world-wide; that Mao, Stalin, Fidel Castro, and so many others are not Communist despots but merely benign "agrarian reformers"; that if we only stopped the war in Vietnam and spent the money on America's inner cities, poverty would disappear; that government exists to help us and solve our problems; that drug use among adults is harmless and victimless; that the sexual revolution will not involve any human road kill; that feminism is not an assault on femininity; that Ronald Reagan is not Presidential material and, if elected, will recklessly initiate WW III; that the epidemic of AIDS engulfing the homosexual community will soon engulf the married heterosexual community unless confiscatory taxes are imposed upon the latter in favor of the former; that planet earth will soon be gripped by a nuclear winter; that planet earth will soon be gripped by man-made Global Warming; that planet earth will soon be gripped by world-wide famine as a result of the population explosion; that Y2K will eat our computers and lead to societal convulsions; and that abortion will soon be widely accepted as it does not involve the taking of innocent unborn human life.”

            I would suggest that there is a crisis all right, but the avatars of the status quo in Washington have it all wrong: the problem lies with the high debt, not with the low debt ceiling.   

            America’s economic data, at once lurid and sobering, can be seen, dynamically, by accessing the US Debt Clock through the following link: http://www.usdebtclock.org/. [Warning!! It will make your hair itch and your children's hair grey.]

            Here’s all you need to know. The nation’s current debt ceiling is $14.294 trillion. Because our “leaders” have irresponsibly spent more than they have taken in for all but 12 of the past 76 years, our national debt currently stands at right around that figure, which represents about 95% of the economy. (Anyone who thinks the government will not spend right up to its debt limit is delusional, which makes so cynical President Obama’s technically correct statement that raising the debt ceiling does not necessarily mean that the federal government will spend the money. The government will because it can, and because it has always done so.) 

            In terms everyone can understand, a national debt of this amount means: a $46,000 lien on every U. S. citizen and a $130,000 lien on every U. S. taxpayer. It also means that under the Great Golfer’s proposed 2012 budget, the U. S. will have to pay over $6 trillion in interest payments alone over the next 10 years. By 2021, over 80% of the projected annual deficit will constitute interest on the national debt, and 89% of all money collected by the government will be used to pay for only four budget items: (i) interest on the national debt, (ii) Medicare, (iii) Medicaid, and (iv) Social Security obligations.  Put another way, in ten years, 89 cents of every dollar collected will be spoken for, leaving our “leaders” with only 11 cents to divvy up among such things as defense, space, education, agriculture, etc.   

            But the 14.2 trillion national debt is only part of the problem. Even were we to pay it down to zero overnight, we would still have to deal with the annual deficit, whose trajectory is unsustainable (just like the public sector stimulus jobs created by the Obama Administration). With an annual budget of $3.6 trillion, and a deficit of $1.4 trillion, it is a function of the hallucinatory detachment of the political class that Boehner’s Bill, which reduces spending by $900 billion over ten years (a mere 6.2% of the national debt) is deemed excessive and “absolutist” by such Democrats as John Kerry.

            But whatever the scope and contours of the crisis, one thing can be said: the people who created it are, by and large, unwilling or incapable of solving it.

            And who are these people? Answer: the selfish and near-sighted members of the political class who have run our government and presided over the political fortunes of this country for the past 40+ years. That class consists, first, of our elected officials in Washington who have clung to power, privilege, and pleasure while failing stunningly in their responsibilities to manage the people’s money and advance the common good. (Democrats are the biggest culprits, but Republicans like both Bushes, Dole, McCain, Cheney, McConnell, etc.  also share in the blame.) Then there are the craven members of the Fourth Estate, the acolytes of our elected “leaders”, who, instead of speaking and writing truth, are themselves corrupted by power and seek above all else access to those who have it and the perquisites that accompany such access. And, finally, there are the “Black Ops” lobbyists who roam the corridors of power in alligator shoes, securing favorable treatment for the ruling class in the labyrinthine provisions of a tax code that, in its pornographic complexity and monumental unfairness, constitutes an affront to free men and women.

            One of the great things that can be said about the Tea Party Movement and its resilience is that members of this supercilious political class, who once viewed members of the Tea Party with derision and contempt, now view them with fear and dread.

            I say three cheers for the Tea Party. They have forced a day of political and economic reckoning upon a Pharisaical class of parasites that is long overdue.