I’ve been wondering: why do otherwise intelligent people – such as our elected “public servants” – behave so irrationally once they take up residence in Washington D.C.? Could it be some sort of air or water contamination; mass hysteria; or just going along with the “cool kids”? I decided to Google the symptoms:
- Anger and irritability (like calling half the electorate semi-fascists)
- Mistreatment of others (such as putting citizens in solitary confinement for taking selfies in the Capitol)
- Lying and sneaky behavior (seems to go along with being a politician)
- Money problems (all of them, I’ll explain later)
- Hiding their stash (i.e., “gold bars in his sock drawer” Menendez)
- Problems at work (I should say so. 85 percent of their bosses -- us -- don't trust them)
Good ole Google gave me the answer with the first search result. They’re all junkies. But their drug of choice isn’t alcohol, gambling, or crack cocaine. They’re addicted to our money. They can’t stop spending money which we don’t have. (That’s the money problem I alluded to before.)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave our elected leadership their first “fix” when he got the feds into the business of giving stuff away, and told them the country could spend its way out of insolvency. I have a cousin that tried to do the same thing with his personal finances – he called it spending money to make money. When done by the government, the practice is called “stimulus” (or alternatively “inflation reduction”). Apparently, it’s called that because it stimulates bankruptcy by taking from those who produce, and giving to those who only consume.
The practice of government stimulus has worked so well that the U.S. debt has increased from $17B in 1929, to a whopping $34T now. We’ve stimulated ourselves to 2,000 times more debt in less than a century, than we had acquired in our first 150 years as a republic. Fun fact: That’s about how the practice worked for my cousin too.
Our dopers in D.C have gotten so good at spending more money than we give them, that the federal government is now borrowing a trillion bucks of new debt every 100 days! That number is so big, it’s hard to understand. Let me put it this way: If we were to balance the budget with a tax increase – to pick up the tab for Congress’s current spending – an average family of 4 would need to pony up an additional $4,000 per month in taxes to cover Washington's habit! That extra 4 large per month would only balance the budget. It wouldn’t make any payments towards our current mountain of bad decisions -- sorry, debt -- and the increase would need to continue forever.
Clearly, tax rates are not the problem. The problem is that our junkies in D.C. can’t control their daily dosing. It’s easy to see why the United States government hasn’t had a balanced budget since sometime in the last century. But don’t worry. Our guys have a workaround for that too. They don’t budget anymore. They just pass another continuing resolution every few months, with a provision to increase their habit – after putting on a piece of fiscal restraint performance art for the public.
FDR didn’t realize when he started all of this, that spending other people’s money is every bit as addictive as crack cocaine.
Everybody knows that addicts must hit rock bottom before they seek help. They must lose something that they love more than their drug of choice before they accept that they have a problem. For example: When a drug addict can’t feed her children because she spent the grocery money on blow, she might realize that her addiction is a problem. But apparently that’s not enough for our politicians, because that is literally what they are doing. They are spending the financial resources of our children to feed their habit. Perhaps they don’t love our kids as much as they love our money.
One way or another, our kids are going to pay for their addiction.
The federal debt is projected to hit $55T by 2034 (that’s a “55” with twelve zeros behind it). In 10 years my granddaughter will probably be starting a family of her own. When she gets married and has a couple of kids, our junkies in D.C. will have amassed $165K of debt for every man, woman, and child in America. My granddaughter’s family will need to service that debt, by at least paying the interest through their taxes. In ten years, an average family of 4 will have a tax bill of $33,000 per year, just to pay the interest on the debt, and nothing else. That’s money that my granddaughter won’t have to
- Save for a down payment on a house,
- Put her children through college,
- Prepare for retirement, and perhaps
- Even put food on the table.
If she and her husband are fortunate enough to buy a house, they will be paying more interest on the federal debt than on their mortgage.
What our junkies in D.C. are doing has real impact on our children. They will be paying for Washington’s bender with austerity (if they’re lucky) or suffering (if the country has collapsed from the debt).
If I were an addict, and I realized my behavior had committed generations of my family to destitution, I’d be searching for a way out of the addiction. But apparently our addicts haven’t hit rock bottom yet.
Elections are important, but not the solution to this problem. Sending new politicians to Washington to “taste the product,” while warning them to avoid the addiction, is a recipe for failure. As First Lady Nancy Reagan recommended, we need to “just say no” – preferably with a Constitutional amendment.
If you would like to be counted among the Idahoans demanding that our federal "public servants" break their habit, visit www.conventionofstates.com/idaho to see how, and to sign the petition.
