David Hines
Bunkum & Bailout Circus
By David Hines
The news has been inundated with wrangling about how to keep going into debt without going into debt. Neither side has been entirely honest.
President Obama has threatened to not send out Social Security checks. This despite Democrats insisting that Social Security is entirely solvent. It is an admission of sorts that the so-called "lock box" has no lock and is not a box. The truth is that if those checks don't go out it is a decision by the administration to prioritize other spending.
The silliness only gets worse. "They haven't even passed a jobs bill!" moan many Dems. The assumption is that only government spending can create jobs. Government can create jobs only by getting out of the way and minimizing regulatory uncertainty. The cost of government "job creation" is multiples of the cost of private-sector job creation; the former are nowhere near as sustainable as the latter, since they are prompted by rhetorical demand rather than by real demand.
The GOP has not been forthright, either. "Cut, Cap & Balance" does none of that stuff.
Cut? No way. The proposal merely decreases proposed increases.
Cap? If they can do nothing to cut this year, there is no assurance that they can commit their future selves, let alone future legislators, to any reductions. Caps have long existed. Congress got around them once by inventing a 13-month year. Recently the standard procedure is to push usual expenditures off-budget and into "emergency supplementals."
Balance? It is assumed that a Constitutional amendment will pass in a decade or so, at which time it will somehow be honored more than the rest of the Constitution is. Worse: the proposal would, in the event of an impasse, give the unitary executive dictatorial budgetary powers. Representative government, such as it currently exists, would be further eviscerated.
All of the proposals are based upon government accounting, which would be prosecuted as fraud were it practiced by any private entity. They further rely upon un-constitutional money — fiat chits printed at will. The Constitution declares gold and silver to be money; Bernanke disagrees; real money would put the lie to funny money.
This wasn't really about straightening about the budget. It was early electioneering. The Dems want the real problems deferred until after the election; the GOP want more spending, but with Obama being blamed for it.
By the time you read this writing some compromise may well have been reached. It will solve nothing. The government defaults every day, through degradation of the currency. Money printing, a.k.a. "quantitative easing," is a de facto slow-motion default — slow at the moment, but threatening to rapidly accelerate at any moment.
No solution is possible until the American people come to a sensible view of government's proper functions. Not even God has made it possible for everyone to live content at somebody else's expense. It's an unrealistic expectation — except in political rhetoric. Yet everyone from the welfare queen to the bankster is aligning with one mendacious side or the other to get somebody else to pay.
They expect thereby to keep the gravy train from derailing. Their gravy is your grave.
© David Hines
August 29, 2011
The news has been inundated with wrangling about how to keep going into debt without going into debt. Neither side has been entirely honest.
President Obama has threatened to not send out Social Security checks. This despite Democrats insisting that Social Security is entirely solvent. It is an admission of sorts that the so-called "lock box" has no lock and is not a box. The truth is that if those checks don't go out it is a decision by the administration to prioritize other spending.
The silliness only gets worse. "They haven't even passed a jobs bill!" moan many Dems. The assumption is that only government spending can create jobs. Government can create jobs only by getting out of the way and minimizing regulatory uncertainty. The cost of government "job creation" is multiples of the cost of private-sector job creation; the former are nowhere near as sustainable as the latter, since they are prompted by rhetorical demand rather than by real demand.
The GOP has not been forthright, either. "Cut, Cap & Balance" does none of that stuff.
Cut? No way. The proposal merely decreases proposed increases.
Cap? If they can do nothing to cut this year, there is no assurance that they can commit their future selves, let alone future legislators, to any reductions. Caps have long existed. Congress got around them once by inventing a 13-month year. Recently the standard procedure is to push usual expenditures off-budget and into "emergency supplementals."
Balance? It is assumed that a Constitutional amendment will pass in a decade or so, at which time it will somehow be honored more than the rest of the Constitution is. Worse: the proposal would, in the event of an impasse, give the unitary executive dictatorial budgetary powers. Representative government, such as it currently exists, would be further eviscerated.
All of the proposals are based upon government accounting, which would be prosecuted as fraud were it practiced by any private entity. They further rely upon un-constitutional money — fiat chits printed at will. The Constitution declares gold and silver to be money; Bernanke disagrees; real money would put the lie to funny money.
This wasn't really about straightening about the budget. It was early electioneering. The Dems want the real problems deferred until after the election; the GOP want more spending, but with Obama being blamed for it.
By the time you read this writing some compromise may well have been reached. It will solve nothing. The government defaults every day, through degradation of the currency. Money printing, a.k.a. "quantitative easing," is a de facto slow-motion default — slow at the moment, but threatening to rapidly accelerate at any moment.
No solution is possible until the American people come to a sensible view of government's proper functions. Not even God has made it possible for everyone to live content at somebody else's expense. It's an unrealistic expectation — except in political rhetoric. Yet everyone from the welfare queen to the bankster is aligning with one mendacious side or the other to get somebody else to pay.
They expect thereby to keep the gravy train from derailing. Their gravy is your grave.
© David Hines
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
