It should be obvious to most people that this country is on a rapid path to ruin. More than thirty cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed, much of it from the Chinese. Nearly half of all adults pay no Federal income taxes and have no stake in seeing the country balance its budget. Worse, a rapidly growing army of able-bodied adults have chosen to live off government handouts.
While most people still get up in the morning and go to work, there are too many who have decided it is too much trouble. This group finds it too easy to sign up for one or more of the many welfare programs that the government actually advertises. Welfare programs set in motion in the 1960s encourage women to have children out of wedlock by giving them more welfare money for each child, setting in motion a depressing cycle of welfare dependence, children without fathers, and a high rate of school dropouts leading to more poverty and crime. And the cycle repeats itself.
On another front, we are spending billions of dollars “modifying” the mortgages of people who should never have been homeowners in the first place and who have the nerve to stay in the house they no longer pay for until they are physically thrown out.
How did we get to this point as a nation where an individual feels that it is acceptable to sit at home and steal the product of someone else’s labor? It’s not the government’s money they are getting. Some man or woman had to go to work to earn that money only to have it taken away in higher taxes to give to someone else.
Unless we change course rapidly we are headed for a collapse, and very soon
Unless we change course rapidly we are headed for a collapse, and very soon. When the country cannot pay its debts and can no longer borrow because creditors will not lend fearing the return of their money; when the interest rate on the debt takes up so much of our budget that there is scant money to pay for necessities, what do you think will happen?
This is the third year in a row in which our deficit will be over one trillion dollars -- a number so high it is difficult to conceive. This year our deficit is on course to be over $ 1,500,000,000,000 . When interest rates rise to more normal levels, as they must, the interest alone on the national debt will pay for the entire Chinese military. Bernard Madoff went to prison for 150 years for a scam like this. As much as some would like to think that this kind of spending and borrowing will go on indefinitely, it can’t. This nation is committing suicide.
The government will have to confiscate more and more money from the ever shrinking pool of actual workers, thus making everyone poor --- except for the elites running the government and their pals. I have just described socialism, an absolute failure wherever it has been tried, but the radicals running this government from the White House on down don’t get it because none of them have ever actually run a business and because they are honest to goodness Marxists despite their denials and the attempts (largely successful) of their friends in the media to cover it up.
A hundred years ago Argentina had the world’s 5th largest economy -- then they turned to socialism. The country has been a basket case ever since. A year ago, about to default on it’s national debt yet again and unable to borrow any more, Argentina confiscated the private retirement plans of its citizens.
Socialism always leads to tyranny and murder because when the government can no longer afford to keep its promises to the people, the only way it can control them is by coercion and force. Socialism led to the murder of one hundred million people, by their own governments, in just the last century. (See Stalin’s intentional famines and Mao’s “purges” and “Cultural Revolution”). Why do we have to re-learn this pathetic lesson over and over?
It can happen here.
Note on the author:
Justin Salem, M.D. is a retired anesthesiologist
