The federal government’s debt load just passed $35 trillion. According to usdebtclock.org, that amounts to $267,000 per taxpayer. It’s worth mentioning that that federal debt load does not include Social Security and Medicare obligations or the obligations arising from other “unfunded liabilities.”
This fiscal situation is not getting any better. That’s because the federal government is spending more than it’s bringing in with taxes. A lot more. Around $2 trillion per year. That means that more money is being added onto the federal debt load each year, which means that each taxpayer’s share of what is owed will be lots more than $267,000.
How many taxpayers could withstand the IRS coming to their homes and businesses and seizing $267,000? I’d venture not very many. Yet, one can assume that before the federal government defaults on its debt, it is going to resort to tyrannical means to get a hold of as much money as it can. In the 1930s, the feds seized people’s gold and replaced them with government notes. More recently, in Argentina the government seized people’s retirement accounts and replaced them with government bonds.
For Democrats, none of this is a problem. Their position can be summed up with the words of Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” As far as they are concerned, the government can continue spending and borrowing like there was no tomorrow. Some of them are even convinced that massive government spending and borrowing are the key to economic prosperity.
For Republicans, the solution is simple: Just balance the budget, so that no more borrowing is necessary. Given that they oppose tax increases to accomplish that, that means a major slashing of expenditures. Yet, when one asks a Republican where the slashing should take place, he stammers and stutters and walks away muttering to himself.
Here’s the problem America faces: No one wants to let go of socialism or the national-security state, which are the biggest components of federal spending and debt. Indeed, no one wants to let go of all the littler programs either. The dole is like heroin. Once people get onto the dole, they are going to fight fiercely to stay on it.
Just consider the crown jewels of American socialism, Social Security and Medicare. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson knew precisely what they were doing when they got these two socialist programs enacted. They knew that once people went on them, the programs would become a permanent part of American life because everyone would be hooked.
Today, the most that Republicans or Democrats dare to propose is a “reform” of these two socialist programs. No Republican or Democrat dares to support their immediate repeal. Most everyone is convinced that without these political narcotics, people would die in the streets.
Even some libertarians, who purport to stand for “liberty,” are among those who fiercely support the continuation of these socialist programs. They say that there is a “contract,” a patently false assertion with respect to any welfare-state program. Or they say that people have the “right to get their money back,” blocking out of their minds that “getting their money back” means plundering and looting others, which is precisely how socialism works.
It’s no different with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which are the three principal components of the national-security state, which most people support. Their expenditures amount to almost $1 trillion per year. They fight as fiercely as Social Security and Medicare recipients to continue receiving their military-intelligence dole. Needless to say, when someone suggests that the national-security state be dissolved and replaced by a limited-government republic, both Republicans and Democrats, and even some libertarians, go ballistic, claiming that it is the national-security establishment that keeps us safe from the terrorists, Muslims, communists, drug dealers, and illegal-immigrant invaders, and Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, Syria, and Cuba.
And what about the lesser dole recipients? The DEA and other drug warriors? Homeland Security? ICE and the Border Patrol? The Departments of Education, Labor, Agriculture, and the rest? All the regulatory agencies? They fight just as fiercely for the continuation of their share of the dole as the proponents of Social Security, Medicare, and the national-security state.
Of course, lurking in the background and always prepared to accommodate that massive, ever-growing debt is the Federal Reserve. That’s its primary purpose. That means doing what it has been doing for decades — printing ever-increasing vast quantities of money to pay down the federal debt, which means a constantly debased currency, as reflected by ever-increasing prices.
There is but one solution to all this fiscal mayhem and it lies not in trying to come up with ways to fix, reform, or gradually reduce the welfare-warfare-state system. Instead, the solution lies in challenging — and rejecting — the legitimacy of the entire welfare-warfare-state system.
More specifically, it entails the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, and all other socialist programs, the dismantling of the national-security state and replacing it with America’s founding system of a limited-government republic, the end of America’s empire of domestic and foreign military bases, the legalization of drugs, open borders, the termination of America’s managed, regulated, and controlled economy, and a repeal of the taxes that fund all this destructive nonsense.
Not only would ending this evil, immoral, and destructive system restore fiscal stability to America, it would also put Americans on the road toward the restoration of economic liberty.
This article was originally published at the Future of Freedom Foundation and is republished here with permission from the author.
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