US national debt piles up next to the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., where no one has the political courage to rise to the challenge of staving off the coming crisis.
Obama, and the Congress for the most part, are not telling us the whole truth about the state of the economy.
Despite the fact that 45 million or more people are on bread lines (SNAP), the president extolled the virtue of an essentially flat-lined economy. Talk all the numbers you want, but any observant American will tell you people are just not spending money. Stores on every street corner sit vacant, lots for commercial development still sit idle and business “ain’t what it used to be.” The evidence of this is shown statistically in the labor force participation rate — fewer people than ever are bringing home a regular paycheck that is sufficient for the typical American way of life.
Furthermore, the president called upon the people of this nation to increase taxation by over $380 billion to fund programs. This necessitates the logical questions we should all be asking. If the economy is so good, why does it need fixing, and where is it going to come from?
$380 billion is nearly half the money the government paid out in the TARP program just 6 years ago. What kind of effect is that going to have; assuming you bought into the ideology that money from the government will help stimulate the economy? $380 billion to the government certainly will have the opposite effect.
Our government is out of money and has no way of paying it back.
What they aren’t talking about is the elephant in the room — the national debt. At $18 plus trillion it is gobbling a larger portion of our money every day and we’re out of credit. They are lying to us and telling us that more taxes, more loopholes or some minor fix is in order.
Essentially, what the President is saying is “we’re broke and we have no way of paying it back.” The government spending these past years has vastly exceeded our ability to pay it back under our current tax code.
What makes me sure of it, is the GOP in its rebuttal failed to discuss the heart of the matter, and instead talked about singular issues such as the Keystone Pipeline. The GOP wants those tax revenues, too. They just are trying to figure out how to structure it with loopholes and tax breaks so their crumb donors will sign off on it.
The wild card in the deck is the conservatives in the Tea Party, which explains why they are trying to destroy them. These guys won’t sign off on anything. They are talking about program cuts and eliminations. That’s heresy inside the beltway.
The bottom line is that government probably will limp along for two more years until the next election and run up more debt, interest and bills, and kick the can down the road. We have to dramatically change the way we think about government and the role in society it should have.
Sooner or later this problem will come to a head; right about the time the real problem we all should be talking about comes to call and chops it off with a scimitar.
Thomas Purcell is nationally syndicated columnist, author of the book “Shotgun Republic” and is host of the Liberty Never Sleeps podcast. More of his work can be found at LibertyNeverSleeps.com.
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