Debt. Debt. Debt. Government at all levels is awash in it. Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country. The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives. California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.
And to think that nobody really cares. The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it. What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater. No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.
Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising. The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life. As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign. The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board. Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers. Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.
The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like. The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.
Where are the adults? Do we really want adults in decision-making posts? Apparently not. Adults aren’t popular. Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns. We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”. As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.
The numbers are staggering. The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below). Meaning, we are close to the land of no return. Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.
If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!” As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot. The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time. The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back. Balderdash. Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers. That’s the truth behind the lies. When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.
How much of an infusion? Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable. They aren’t. Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095. Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion. If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below). If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.
California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”. Well, they got this one right. California is likely to be the country’s future. They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum. It’s a playground of the insane. There’s your future.
The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022. Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.” And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence. 23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion. It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below). Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies. Got that?
In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets. The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi. Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs. They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).
The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising. Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below). I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento. These nincompoops are popularly elected. The people of the state have their foot on the pedal. The people want fiscal insanity.
So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation. The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.
As one stanza puts it:
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”
Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections. Stew on that for a while.
RogerG
Sources:
1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/
