The Patriot Post® · False Choices Amidst Real Crisis: Greece and the US

I must confess, watching our elected officials deal with the debt ceiling, budget, and impending financial implosion of the dollar, has the same morbid fascination of seeing a train wreck unfold right before your eyes. You really hope this is an Xbox game and everybody is just virtually dead, instead of real, flesh and blood gone the way of all the earth type of demise, but it is not to be. What truly adds to the surreal nature of the spectacle is the way the ruling class elite and the chattering classes have all but ignored it, preferring to engage in fear-mongering amongst the elderly (the ad about Rep. Ryan “throwing granny off the cliff” because he advocates cuts to medicaid, never mind that those cuts will not effect anybody older than 55) and steadfastly refusing to pass a budget. The Democrat-controlled Senate (I was going to say led, but there is no leadership from the Dems in that political body) has not passed a budget for almost 790 days, or for the approximate amount of time Obama has been president. There is a kernel of truth to the Democratic claim that this is President Bush’s fault: They are, after all, still using his last budget… In all seriousness, the failure to pass a budget and address the fiscal catastrophe that the nation is facing is nothing less than treasonous, because the effects of defaulting on our debt and losing reserve currency status for the dollar, will hamstring the ability of this nation to prosper for generations to come, and do what none of our enemies has hitherto succeeded in doing: Relegate us to the status of a second-tier nation, a has-been like England or Spain with only the old, musty trappings of faded glory to remind their young of what once had been the mightiest nation on the face of the earth.

A nation can endure many indignities and still emerge, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of war and tragedy to reclaim material success. Japan, Germany, and the whole eastern theater of WWII combat operations bear testament to the resiliency of nations, particularly when they have the United States and the Marshall plan to help do the heavy lifting. The current economic debacle is, however,  a worldwide phenomenon, fueled by two generations of Keynesian deficit spending and welfare state policy that destroy a nation’s wealth-building capacity in the name of income redistribution and social justice. The end result of such social/fiscal policies is always and ever an equality of all to be poor and miserable while the the elites rail at the stupidity of the common man for being ungrateful for being saved from themselves. Al Gore will never live in a cave as an example of “carbon-light” living, Congress will never abide by the rules it enacts for others, and socialists will never comprehend why an all-knowing government fails so miserably at creating wealth and managing the marketplace. But the Socialist/Communist experiments of the last century have shown us one area in which such governments excel above all others: in repression, genocide and the destruction of the economy, freedoms and social fabric of the nations unfortunate enough to fall under their sway. Which brings us back to to the current administration.

Faced with the fact that a tax rate of 100% of all income from all taxpayers would still not eliminate the national debt and budget deficit (which to be precise are two enormously large, but different entities), our fearless (and clueless) Democratic party refuses to cut spending and abide by a debt ceiling, instead pushing for a tax increase! When current fiscal policies have wiped out nearly half of the asset base of the nation through the housing collapse, doubled the unemployment rate, tripled the deficit spending of the Federal Government, and pushed the actual rate of inflation up to 10% while doubling the price of gasoline and other traditional energy sources, increasing the burden on those who are already drowning is an act of sheer insanity! Unless your end goal is to destroy the USA as a world power, in which case, the cunning of a fox is a more apt descriptive term. Obama ran on a campaign slogan that was, in part, about the “audacity of hope,” in which one can only wonder if the hope mentioned was to destroy the United States of America. But it is not as if he did not warn us: He did promise that he and his minions would bring about “a basic transformation of the nation.” A majority of the voters must of thought the “change we have been waiting for” was, in fact going to be positive, pleasant change, not the systematic dismantling of every facet of what made America a great and exceptional nation. Now the nation we most resemble financially is Greece, who is selling off all of her national treasures and landmarks to avoid defaulting on her debt. Anybody interested in a White House for sale in D.C.? Oh I am sorry, some folks from Chicago already bought it a couple of years ago, and have been running the printing presses to pay off their union/socialist/race-baiting lenders ever since.