A Few Suggestions ... Stop the Spending

I think that always ragging on the Democrats and Obama is a little negative. It isn't as if the Republicans are all that much better. Their rhetoric is better. They claim they're for small government, but of course it never seems to get any smaller and the only difference when they're in power is that the growth of government is a little slower.

We can't keep growing the debt and spending money irresponsibly like this so how do we stop? One way is the way we seem to be headed right now: 1) Total Catastrophe. We should be hitting the sustainability limit any day now. The whole GDP of the United States is only around 14 Trillion dollars and we're well on the way to adding that much liability to the national debt in the first 120 days or so of the Obama administration. That's certainly not sustainable.

Politicians are addicted to money, your money. They spend it as if there is no tomorrow and the debt will never have to be paid. Of course that's not true. It will be paid one way or the other. Right now it looks like it might be paid by economic collapse, hyper inflation and total chaos in a economic train wreck that might make the Great Depression look like a cake walk. Of course that's probably a worst case scenario. It's hard to even get accurate numbers. You'll be able to tell that things have gone way too far when other countries stop taking our money. Of course by then it will be too late.

So what can we do. Most people don't seem to be bothered by all this very much. I'm not sure why that is. When we as individuals spend too much money we end up being cut off either by the bank or our creditors. That's what will happen in a somewhat parallel way if other governments decide to shift out of dollars. Of course we have them over the barrel since they are holding a lot of dollars and they can't spend them anywhere but here if other governments are unwilling to take them.

The gold standard used to be a limit on this kind of thing since you could ask to be paid in gold and a big advantage of gold, whatever the down side, is that it is an objective concrete standard of value because it has intrinsic value. The only intrinsic value a dollar has is the good faith of the government and as we see, increasingly that's not looking so good. If you can't be trusted with the peoples treasure why would some other government trust you?

But people don't seem to care and I think that's because money, especially really large amounts of money seems so unreal to begin with. If you can't conceive of a million dollars than the fact that a trillion is a million million just doesn't really register. At least it doesn't register until the bottom falls out and then it is too late to do much.

I suppose we can't really do too much until people are ready to say "Stop." It might help if we had politicians in Washington that were honorable men. Oh I know they all say they are honorable. How honorable is it to bankrupt the country? How honorable is it to vote on a spending bill that no-one, and I mean no-one, has read? How honorable is it to sell your vote for an ear-mark for your district? Don't tell me they're honorable. It's reached the point that everyone in Washington is what they used to call a carpetbagger. They're there to rake it in and sell us all out. Yeah I know your Congressman is an exception. So is mine. So apparently is everyones' and that doesn't make sense.

Between stimulus packages, simply crazy Rube Goldberg schemes like Cap and Trade, and the Federalization of Health Care and whatever the next crazy schemes are the power grab is monumental and likely destructive. We will not survive this so we have to stop it. How do you stop it? You have to vote out the people who are doing it. That's all you can do under our form of government. For that to happen you have to care and you have to understand that the alternative is going to be the dissolution of the Republic. Tyranny Rising!!