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The Challenge of Explaining the Critical Economic Mess To An Economically Ignorant Populous

Imagine that you live in a household that is neck-deep in debt.  Your credit is maxed out and the loan sharks are cracking their knuckles.  Then a supposed savior comes with the solution.  It involves putting a charge/expense on the usage of things that everyone uses in the household in order to generate more revenue to settle the debt.   Everyone using anything and everything from the fridge, the bed, or the automobiles had added fees ranging from 15 to 55 cents per usage.  Even the act of putting money away for a rainy day, retirement, or investing had an added fee in the top ranges.

To many this story sounds absurd and crazy.  And some may ask how can charging fees [taxes] on one’s most basic of activities and the very means of their production of income or wealth possibly be a way to bring in more wealth to get out of debt?  The answer is that it simply doesn’t.  But this is what is being proposed by both the political party leaders in the D.C. and Mr. Obama.  Rather than deal with the root issue of the maxing out of the credit card and spending way beyond its means, the government seeks just to squeeze more coins out of the house [the nation] that could possibly go towards producing more revenue to at least pay down the house’s debt and put it on the path to economic freedom and prosperity. It instead purchases more credit; thereby going into more debt to the loan sharks and the debt holders.

Sir Winston Churchill may have said it best when he said, “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”.  According to usdebtclock.org the government of the United States government brings in approx. $2,448,596,456,780.  But, it spends approx. $3,538,167,445,264.  One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to see that that’s economical hole more than a trillion dollars.  The federal government’s total debt is over $16 trillion – $5 trillion of which Mr. Obama added just in his first term alone.  I know that these numbers makes some peoples eyes go cross-ways, but to bring it closer to home the total U.S governments debt breaks down to over astoundingly $140 thousand per U.S Taxpayer.  There is no honest talk, if any at all, of cutting up the credit cards of the federal government and reducing it’s spending on all but the truest essentials, paying on the debt and interest, and or incentivizing more economic growth for the benefit of the nation’s posterity.

The analogy maybe simple, but the economic crisis that currently faces the nation, via the federal government, is no more complicated than the government spending more than in brings in and the American people not properly holding it accountable. The solutions being presented by Mr. Obama and the Republican House Speaker, whose party is supposed to be for limited government and low taxes, is to make revenue generating actions and activities cost more, and thus disincentivized those actions and activities from being engaged in, such as research and development by businesses, starting a new business, investing and savings by both individuals and businesses, and small business expansion and job creation, the actual things that can make us economically solvent again.  These such activities, or the lack thereof, do not occur in a vacuum, but have ripple effects that vibrates throughout the national economy.

But as egregious as the actions or inactions of the federal government are, what maybe even more unforgivable is the inability or unwillingness of the American people to hold the government and politicians accountable.  Too many Americans are oblivious regarding the dire straights the nation is in financially, and many others couldn’t care less.  Too many Americans have been conditioned to view political matters as something that can be left as someone else’s responsibility.  Too many taxpayers have no real idea how much in taxes they’re actually paying and where their money is going.  Too many Americans know more about the actions and activities of entertainers and sports athletes, who have no true affects on our lives, and have no idea who their congressional representative is or how their taxes will be effected through either the sequestration, the Bush Tax Cuts, Obamacare, or any of the  hundreds of laws that are annually passed in the Congress.  It truly doesn’t matter what the politicians do in D.C in the next couple of days if the majority of the populous have no real idea what they should be doing. The citizens of the United States and the American people have the representative government that we deserve and demand.  Jefferson warned us to be eternally vigilant to ensure that the government acts in our best interest.  If it doesn’t, and does so with impunity, we have only ourselves to blame.  And if the house’s finances are not put in order or at least be put on a path towards that end very soon led by a politically informed and engaged populous the nation will have no credit standings and the loan sharks will be doing more than cracking their knuckles.