by Jack Lee
The United States, meaning the Obama Administration, has recently loaned $600b of your taxpayer dollars to European Central Bank. This action triggered an automatic spending reduction of $472b to our defense budget and it comes at a time when China’s military rapidly catching up with our own. That can’t be good!
Since 2008 our Federal Reserve System has used $7.2 trillion to bail out U.S. and European banks, which has brought the total U.S. debt up to about $16 trillion. This looks really ugly, but it gets worse when you consider that a dollar is just an IOU. We’ve been off the gold standard since 1971.
Who is offering these IOU’s and who is being asked to pay? Well, that’s not easy to answer, but the short version is it’s the [feds] doling out the trillions in paper currency, meaning the Federal Reserve Bank and it’s network of banks. They are a private institution controlled by people who are not elected. Although the Federal Reserve is supposed to be acting completely independent of Congress and all it’s crazy politics, the fact remains… it is heavily influence by politics!
It can be argued that the Fed is often just doing the bidding of President Obama and Congress. That has to be disconcerting since it’s the politicians that have brought us to this low point under a mountain of debt.
Okay, so we can blame Congress for the mounting debt, the bailouts and the screwy loans to banks here and abroad via the Fed. However, I would not be honest if I didn’t admit this overspending has been a bipartisan problem for years. But, and the facts support this part, its been mostly the democrat party that has been responsible for overspending because they are in love with this big Nanny government concept.
Too bad finger pointing won’t fix the debt, because we could sure make a case against liberal democrats (and we should).
Taxing us more so they can spend more – won’t fly!
Government has borrowed and spent beyond their means for far too long and they’ve run up a 16 trillion dollar tab. They’re spendaholic’s… seemingly without oversight!!! One of the major obsticals to a balanced budget has been us voters. Voters are torn between the “gimme more entitlements” camp and the camp that is asking for entitlements to stop! Good luck with that, huh? Too many American’s want a free lunch and so we can’t blame it all on Congress, they’re just behaving like you would expect politicians to behave – buying votes with our money.
It’s been consistently estimated that somewhere between 25% to 30% of the federal budget is wasted. It’s either spent foolishly or lost to fraud and it’s been going on for decades, yet Congress has done almost nothing to fix it.
Former agency chief Dr. Donald Berwick said in a New York Times interview that up to 30 percent of the money spent by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is wasted. In an interview given on his last day at the helm, Berwick blamed the high level of waste partly on inefficiencies within the agency. CMS pours money down the drain on overtreated patients, uncoordinated care, an administrative labyrinth, overbearing rules and fraud, he said.
Imagine what we could have by cutting out hundreds of billions in waste from our bloated budget?
How could any rational thinking person justify raising taxes to enable a dysfunctional overspending entity like Congress to spend even more money? Only a congressman (or President) could do that because to us lay folks it makes no sense whatsoever. The only thing that makes sense to us is to reign in the chronic spenders as we force them to cut, waste, fraud and abuse within their ranks. And we can do that with the stroke of a pen!
There is only one solution and it’s undeniable at this point, we need a Constitutional amendment to impose a balanced budget on the spenders.
There should be no argument within Congress that we need it… the evidence that compelling! Only those who are part of the spending problem should be opposed to the idea and those are the bums we need to target for immediate removal.
Europe knows: A balance budget amendment was the very first order of business for the European Common Market as they try to save nations from debt overload. The two most solvent nations, Germany and France, are dictating terms and they said Greece and no other common market nation is going to get any further bailouts unless they adopt a balanced budget! Can’t get much more clear than that can we?
Unless the democrats in Congress change their compulsion toward socialism (the big nanny state) absent fiscal responsibility, no temporary bailout measures will save us from eventual economic collapse. We need a balanced budget amendment and anyone who blocks it should be removed from office.
References:
1. http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=5497&type=0
2. http://www.massdevice.com/news/ex-medicare-chief-says-30-health-spending-waste-massdevicecom-call