August 3, 2011

With a national debt of $14.3
trillion dollars that is roughly 95-96 percent of GDP, both houses of Congress
passed, and the president signed, the debt ceiling increase.

Even with proposed spending
cuts, the measure does not reduce the debt, nor does it offer a means of
reducing the debt. It does the opposite, guaranteeing an increase in debt by an
additional $7 trillion within the next 10 years. At the very best, all the bill
does is slow the rate of increase by about 1-2 percent as opposed to what it would
have been without its passage.

“Indeed, both the government and its debts
will continue to grow faster than the American economy,” said a New York Times
news story.

What the bill allows is for a
$900 billion increase in the debt ceiling this year alone with further
borrowing increases that will take the debt to more than $20 trillion during
the next decade. What it is supposed to do is cut $2.4 trillion in spending
during that same 10-year period.

As the saying goes, “You do the
math.”

According to the New York Times
story: “Americans will face higher taxes, particularly as investors begin to
demand higher interest rates. Economists disagree about the amount of debt a
nation can safely carry relative to the size of its economy, but there is
widespread concern that 100 percent is too much, and that the weight of debt
would begin to suppress economic activity.”

Considering the current
proximity to the 100 percent mark, the country will hit that figure soon.
MSNBC reported on Aug. 4 that the debt is only a few hundred billion away. Further, the Times story said the biggest costs, the ones that will continue to
put the country’s finances over fiscal the edge are those associated with
entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. So even without factoring
the warfare state, the welfare state is destructive in its own right.

Republicans and Democrats
alike, anyone who bought into, and continues to buy into, the Keynesian model
of statist economics that proclaims debt is good have both brought us to this
financial mess.

It’s not surprising that while Pennsylvania’s
U.S. senators, Toomey and Casey split on the vote, the two Republican U.S.
representatives in our area, Joe Pitts and Pat Meehan, both voted for it.

Why do politicians like
spending and debt? Because it’s a power rush and they can get away with it.
Politicians accrue power and voter loyalty that way. They build constituencies
of individuals and businesses who are dependent on government largesse and,
therefore, will do nothing to stop the runaway spending or borrowing…as long as
they don’t have to pay the bill.

Greed is not necessarily a bad
thing — it can motivate production — but greed without personal responsibility
— expecting something from others for nothing in return, without earning what you get—most assuredly is bad
and childish. Yet, the worst form of greed, the form that is actually evil, is
the lust for power. That’s what the party politicians play for.

Were it not for the Tea Party, the debt-ceiling controversy might never have taken place. Kudos on that count alone.

It comes as no surprise that the governing class and its boosters in the media portray the Tea Party folks as a collection of bumpkins and idiots who “don’t know the difference between campaigning and governing” — indeed, who would rather destroy the world economy than compromise their dogmatic insistence on spending cuts and resistance to tax increases.

 

But the policy and media elites’ attitude reveals more about them than about the Tea Party. The spenders and borrowers in Washington have had their way largely unimpeded for generations. What have they wrought? A formal debt about equal to the American economy’s annual output (GDP), a 75-year “entitlement” unfunded liability of $39 trillion, a budget deficit that far exceeds $1 trillion a year (more than 40 cents per dollar spent, about 10 percent of GDP), and federal spending that consumes about 25 percent of GDP.

 

And that isn’t enough for the governing class and its apologists in the intelligentsia!

 

All this happened before there was a Tea Party. Without it the debt ceiling would very likely have been raised with little fuss, as it has been so often before. It would not have been linked to a debate over cutting spending, reducing the deficit, and shrinking the government. Some Tea Partiers opposed raising the ceiling under any circumstances. Contrary to the power elite, that is not a sign not of ignorance and inexperience but of good sense.

 

No one exemplified anti–Tea Party snobbery more clearly than MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell (though he had close competition from his colleagues Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow). Stunned and outraged that the Tea Party was able to keep a new debt-ceiling bill from being passed without difficulty or even public notice, he furiously waved an old one-page debt-limit bill, fuming, “There is nothing easier for Congress to do than to raise the debt limit.”

 

How pathetic to see O’Donnell being so clueless about two important things: first, that the ease with which the government has been able to borrow is a big part of the problem facing the country, and second, that this ease in abusing the American people is precisely why the Tea Party emerged.

 

For O’Donnell and his state-worshiping ilk, any resistance to the growth of government spending — which, let us recall, is nothing but the forcible transfer of scarce resources from private owners to greedy, power-lusting politicians — is an impertinence, a sign of disrespect for one’s betters. How dare anyone question those anointed to “run the country”? How dare mere citizens object to being committed to more debt, which will impose additional burdens on them, their children, and their grandchildren? How dare they thwart the grand schemes their benevolent rulers have in store for them?

 

Well, the Tea Party knows better than O’Donnell & Company that the politicians are not our betters. And they know a political comeuppance is long overdue.

 

For all that, I give a cheer and a half for the Tea Party. But why not more than that?

 

Because the Tea Partiers need to be more radical. They have missed too many opportunities to advance their cause.

 

For one thing, they have been largely silent on the American empire. The government spends more than $1 trillion a year on imperial activities misleadingly called “defense,” far more than the nearly $700 billion in the War Department’s budget. Empires are bloody expensive, and the sooner the Tea Party understands that, the more effective it will be in fighting for smaller government. They also should understand that that trillion dollars is not just a misguided effort to protect American security. It is a scam largely designed to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex. They can start by reading President Eisenhower’s farewell address.

 

Second, Tea Partiers need to learn that the middle-class welfare state is a snare and a delusion. Social Security and Medicare masquerade as benevolent mutual-aid programs, but they are devices to foster allegiance to power. If you depend on politicians for support in your later, vulnerable years, how can your freedom truly be secure? The welfare state robs working people while turning the elderly into wards of the cold state.

 

 

 

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) and editor of The Freeman magazine.