Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Amid global meltdowns, what is the half life of the U.S. government's fiscal solvency?

Thanks to the recent (and laughable) "largest annual spending cut in history" announced by Obama and Boehner, it is now abundantly evident that the U.S. government is headed toward a complete economic meltdown that will make Fukushima look chilly by comparison. While cesium-137 may have a half-life of 30 years, and iodine-131 a half-life of 8 days, if the U.S. government continues on its current path of spending trillions of dollars it doesn't have, the half-life of the value of a dollar may soon be measured in hours.

Want to buy a loaf of bread at the store? Bring a bucket load of cash, because by the time you get there to buy it, the price may have doubled yet again, Zimbabwe-style. Such absurdities are now headed our way, and they will arrive sooner that you've been led to believe.

The downward spiral of the debt addiction

That's because in order to avoid a government shutdown, the U.S. government has recently decided to go bankrupt instead. Already drunk from the freewheeling spending of other people's money, the feds have now resorting to the intravenous mainlining of new debt just to take another "hit" that will get them by for another week or two.

To call the U.S. political leaders "debt junkies" is an insult to heroin addicts. After all, heroin addicts mostly destroy only themselves and their loved ones, not entire nations. But Washington's new policies -- endorsed by both the Democrats and the Republicans -- are based on the street drug equivalent of snorting five lines of cocaine while mainlining heroin while riding a double hit of meth chased down with the desperate chugging of unfiltered Russian vodka smuggled into the country in used gasoline cans.

Like a drug addict passed out face-down on the sidewalk in a pool of his own vomit, wearing nothing but a ragged pair of underwear soaked with his own urine, the United States federal government is now beyond the window of opportunity for rational intervention. It is now a basket case of "schizonomics" where key economic decisions are made by leaders who, instead of following the laws of economics, follow the persistent voices in their own heads. And those voices keep repeating the same disturbing mantra: Spend! Spend! SPEND!

There is no medication strong enough to quell this chorus of fiscal insanity, either, because these voices are not based in reality but rather a kind of economic mental illness that has infected the minds of nearly every lawmaker in America today. Strangely, the CDC offers no statistics on this unsightly epidemic, perhaps because the White House has named this insidious disease "Economic Policy."

IMF declares USA is headed straight into a dead end

As if to underscore the chilling degree of derangement in Washington D.C., the IMF has issued one of the strongest statements yet about U.S. debt spending, declaring that the USA lacked a "credible strategy" to stabilize its debt (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dc1aadea-...). Furthermore, it warns that runaway debt spending from Washington threatens to cause a global financial crisis.

So far, all we've seen from Washington is financial sleight of hand and trickery. Most of the recent $38.5 billion in cuts -- which were already puny compared to the total debt spending -- were achieved by using accounting tricks and claiming to have cut programs that were already slated to be cut anyway (http://apnews.myway.com/article/201...).

Even then, Democrats screamed as if they were having their fingernails plucked out. If they can't stomach a miniscule $38.5 billion in cuts, how on Earth are they going to find a way to stomach the trillions of dollars in spending cuts that must be made to keep the government solvent?

Huge 15.7% increase in budget deficit in just one year

Almost as if to underscore the insanity of the situation, recently-released figures from the U.S. Treasury reveal that the budget deficit has shot up 15.7% in just one year. The deficit for just the October-March period (half a year) was $829 billion. (http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newsb...)

What we're seeing here is the U.S. government burning through nearly a trillion dollars in new debt every six months. This is beyond the bounds of everyday, crazy-dude-on-the-street insanity. It is very rapidly approaching a level of economic terrorism on the part of our national leaders. To continue to drive America's finances into such unbearable depths of debt is very nearly an act of economic warfare against America -- a "financial dirty bomb," if you will. A bomb that, when it goes off, will sadly injure America's economy in a way that will absolutely dwarf the economic fallout of 9/11.

A plot to destroy the federal government?

I keep wondering: At what point does all this engineered debt spending become treason against the United States of America? Recall that a man manufacturing gold coins in the U.S. was recently arrested and charged with a "criminal conspiracy to destroy the federal government." (http://thewarningsigns.blogspot.com...)

His gold coins were called "fake currency" (yeah, because paper money is REAL money, I suppose, and gold is FAKE money, if you can believe that), and he is now facing something like 30 years in prison.

So I started to get concerned about all this, and because I'm a patriotic American who doesn't want to see any harm come to this country, I grew concerned about how criminals conspiring to bring down the federal government might actually plot to conduct such an evil plan.

And then it was immediately obvious: They would burden the United States government under a mountain of unbearable debt to the point where the whole system would implode and the government would collapse. That's when I realized, gee, this evil plot is already under way! Care to guess who's running this evil effort to destroy the federal government? It's the U.S. Congress itself, of course, with all its mindless debt spending that can have no outcome other than the destruction of the federal government.

So at what point do these sellout members of Congress and the executive branch get properly investigated for their role in this plot to destroy the federal government? This is not a flippant question. It's a serious one. If we have powerful people within our own federal government who are pushing us onto a path that can only end in the outright destruction of our government, then doesn't that absolutely demand that we consider them to be possible threats to our nation?

I mean, isn't it just astonishing that a guy smuggling a trunk load of marijuana into the USA gets arrested, questioned, threatened and prosecuted, and yet lawmakers in Washington who are acting in concert to destroy the U.S. government's financial solvency aren't even considered any kind of danger at all?

Madoff's crime was not thinking big enough

Seriously: Bernie Madoff is doing prison time for running a grand Ponzi scheme. And yet isn't the U.S. Congress running a far larger Ponzi scheme, where money is taken from one generation with a promise that they will be paid back in the future (Social Security and Medicare), but the only way the government can actually pay them is to bring in new money from new suckers who are given the same false promise?

Isn't this the very definition of a Ponzi scheme? And isn't it a criminal act to operate such a Ponzi scheme? So how is the U.S. Congress, which oversees and engineers this entire scheme, any different from Bernie Madoff who bilked investors for billions?

I'll tell you the difference: The U.S. Congress is doing it with trillions, not billions. If your scam gets large enough, it magically becomes the law of the land. The only failure of Bernie Madoff, it turns out, is that he didn't think big enough.

If you scam a few thousand people, that's a felony crime. If you scam the entire nation, that's called a reelection campaign.

Worse than terrorism

Folks, I think it is time that We the People really began to investigate the possible criminality of our representatives in Washington. If a radical terrorist brought in a chemical bomb and set it off in Washington, that would be widely (and rightly) considered a criminal act of terrorism. So why is it acceptable for lawmakers to keep building a financial time bomb that will soon be set off in Washington? The economic damage could be far larger than the fallout from a chemical attack.

I think we should seriously consider adopting a stance where lawmakers who vote to further increase the U.S. federal debt are stripped of their political positions and booted out of Congress... at least until we get the federal budget back into balance, so that we have paid off all the debt and we're running with a sensible policy where expenditures are equal to revenues, right now, THIS year and every year.

No more "we'll pay for it down the road" justifications. No more smoke-and-mirrors budget cuts that don't even kick in until five years down the road. We simply walk into the House of Representatives with 435 pink slips and we take a vote on balancing the federal budget. Those who refuse to vote for a balanced budget just get fired from their jobs. We'll call it "downsizing."

Because if Congress can't figure out a way to cut government spending, we'll start the process by eliminating their salaries, one by one, until we either get to a balanced budget or we end up with a U.S. Congress with just two members remaining: Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

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