No one seems to be heeding the severe warning signals—all the red warning lights are flashing distress.
This from frontpagemag.com.
The disaster of a communist/globalist crime syndicate appointee, Comrade Kamala, in her acceptance mumbling at the DNC assured the roaring crowd she would “never stop fighting” for the American people and she would “blaze a new way forward.”
Forward into disaster, into absolute insolvency? And never stop fighting for We the People—when did she start?
The speech disclosed no details, and she appeared too absent-minded of ideas to reign in government spending but seemed intent on handing out generous benefits to grateful voters.
The dangled possibilities could very well have included:
– Subsidies for home mortgages,
– [F]orgiveness of student loans, and
– [F]ree universal preschool.
Unsurprisingly, Comrade Kamala and the other purveyors of free stuff have a big problem: As all communists/socialists do, they have run out of other peoples’ money to give away.
And it is not just America, rather each of the world’s advanced economies are seeing the bill come due for decades of social spending having exceeded revenue. American leftists like to chide fiscal conservatives for fretting about high tax rates:
[B]ut economists now note that some high-tax European states are approaching the peak of the Laffer curve, the point at which raising tax rates fails to raise additional revenues. That means hitting the wall.
Western politicians over the last century developed a different style of campaigning for office.
Rather than emphasizing the common good and overall strength of the nation, they competed on the basis of what government services they could provide to individuals and groups.
The responses to the Great Depression and the Covid crisis were especially harmful. The New Deal failed to end the depression. We have WWII to thank for that.
But the traumatic experience convinced many Americans to think of the government as their benevolent caretaker.
The economic deprivations caused by the Covid crisis were due to mostly self-inflicted wounds like the economic and educational shutdowns. Worse, long after the crisis had passed, the checks kept going out to Americans who were not impoverished. The “emergency” expenditures morphed into entitlements.
America has developed a culture of spending which caused the national debt in 2023 to exceed 120% of GDP while 100% has long been considered the outer limit of acceptable indebtedness.We also have hundreds of trillions more in future obligations to beneficiaries with no funding source available.
Time and demographics are not on America’s side. In just the next 12 years:
– [A]ging baby boomers will reduce the ratio of workers (25 to 64) to retirees (65 and older) from 3:1 to 2:1,
– The fastest growing demographic group is those 85 and older, who require extra funding, and
– [I]ncreased security risks like war and terrorism will create additional budgetary stresses.
Also, there are fewer alternatives to reduced spending than ever available. Tax increases are politically unpopular and often do not produce the hoped for outcomes because they reduce productivity. European countries have approximately 50% higher tax revenues than America, yet their real GDP per capita is lower, even factoring in the government services and subsidies they receive.
The era of low interest rates and the accompanying “sugar high” is over. The higher cost of debt financing will inevitably impair the ability of succeeding generations, already tapped out, to shoulder the burden of our selfish spending.
By now, America has breezed past all the easy fixes. To repeat from above, we, as a nation, are failing to heed the severe warning signals. All the red warning lights are flashing distress, but there is no sense of urgency to change our ways—both political parties are feigning nonchalance. Getting elected or re-elected is still the imperative that trumps all others.
Scores of scholarly papers have been written on how to reduce government waste and how to recover Covid over-payments, all to no avail. Without Conservative adult leadership, politicians will not become interested in reducing spending and, sadly, neither will that portion of the public that is on the take.
