The Folly of Big Government – Our Massive Debt Highlighted

Posted by Tina

There are many good articles to read today but when I found one by Walter Williams I just knew he’d have something valuable to say…I wasn’t disappointed:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. … We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot!”

Was he referring to the eight to ten years prior to Trump?

No, he was offering the lesson that when you don’t learn from history you are bound to repeat it. Here’s the quote in context:

The most often stated cause of the Great Depression is the October 1929 stock market crash. Little is further from the truth. The Great Depression was caused by a massive government failure led by the Federal Reserve’s rapid 25 percent contraction of the money supply. The next government failure was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which increased U.S. tariffs by more than 50 percent. Those failures were compounded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. Leftists love to praise New Deal interventionist legislation. But FDR’s very own treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, saw the folly of the New Deal, writing: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. … We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot!” The bottom line is that the Federal Reserve Board, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and Roosevelt’s New Deal policies turned what would have been a two, three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 16-year affair.

In the 1960’s our government went on to create what has become more folly in the form of Medicare and medicid, Read the history behind what is now known as HHS here. It includes the following that should have served as a big red flag warning:

1965: The Social Security Act is amended to create Medicare, a universal health program for the elderly administered by the federal government, and Medicaid, a health program for the poor administered by the states and jointly funded by federal and state taxpayers. Official projections far underestimate Medicare’s long-term costs. Originally, Part A is projected to cost $9 billion by 1990, but it ends up costing $67 billion that year.19
1965: At the signing ceremony for Medicare, President Lyndon Johnson says: “No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents.”20 But unless Medicare’s rapid growth is cut, the program will do the exact opposite of what Johnson claimed because rising taxes will severely eat away at the income of young families.

And it has. Look at your paystubs and do the math. The programs put a big dent in every budget and that sacrifice still does not cover the actual cost.

The Trump administration is working like crazy to restore our nations economic health and security. He’s downsizing government in areas where he legally can to reduce the cost and scope of the bureaucracy. But the national debt will be one of his his most challenging problems, as it has been for many decades. Neither Democrats nor Republicans seem willing to face voters with the difficult truth behind our rapidly growing debt. Government made a big mistake when it created programs it could not pay for and required big bureaucracies that only added to the cost. It will be somewhat painful to fix this government made problem.

Republicans have tried to address this problem with voters in the past. They have brought facts to the argument. They have suggested reforms that would continue to serve the most vulnerable while ensuring that younger citizens would not suffer the consequences of our government’s failure. But their proposals have been met with a cacophony of ludicrous negativity from the opposition party…if Republicans change the Medicare systems, even if the changes mean less debt, the retired and elderly die! Mean Republicans would throw their own Granny off the cliff.

In 2016 Time reported on the federal cost of the newest entitlement program, Obamacare: “The non-partisan office (CBO) estimates that the program will cost the federal government $1.34 trillion over the next decade, an increase of $136 billion from the CBO’s predictions in 2015.” This expensive federal program will add that much more to our debt. Obama and company, like Lyndon Johnson and company before them, gave little thought to rising debt or the increases in taxes that would be required to sustain these programs.

We may all go off the cliff if we allow Democrats to continue to play games instead of facing facts and then working with Republicans to make needed cutbacks and reforms.

The folly of creating a big bloated government is clear. The bigger it gets the more will be taken from private citizens to pay the price which is always greater, much greater, than anticipated. The bigger it gets the less our representatives want to do what is necessary…what’s in the best interests of the people.The bigger it gets the more wasteful and inefficient it becomes and compensation is awarded by rote and entitlement rather than merit or necessity.

It is the duty of every citizen to become fully educated in these matters. We certainly can;t rely on every representative or media outlet to inform us responsibly.