Guess what? The Democrats and the Republicans are both lying to us again. So what else is new? The truth is that the great “budget crisis” which supposedly took us to the verge of a government shutdown was just a whole bunch of political theater. Even the Associated Press is declaring that our politicians used “accounting sleight of hand” to reach the $38.5 billion budget cut figure. Not that $38.5 billion was an impressive number to begin with. $38.5 billion would just be one percent of the federal budget. But once you strip away the accounting charades, the real budget cut number is somewhere around 14 billion dollars. It turns out that the “budget cuts” include money left unspent from previous years, earmarks that were going nowhere, unused census money and programs that Obama was already planning to cut. The more you examine the “budget deal”, the more it becomes obvious that the Republicans and the Democrats had no intention of doing anything serious about our debt problems. The U.S. government is still going to run a record-setting budget deficit in 2011 and both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame.
So should we be surprised that our politicians have been lying to us again?
Of course not.
But if something is not done about our soaring debt it is absolutely going to crash our financial system.
According to the IMF, the U.S. government will have to borrow an amount of money equivalent to 29 percent of GDP this year alone in order to finance its budget deficit and its maturing debt.
That is what you call a crisis.
But neither political party seems the least bit serious about the national debt.
The Republicans are proposing even more tax cuts without saying how they are going to pay for them, and they even tucked an increase in military spending into the “budget cut” deal.
The Democrats don’t seem to want to cut much of anything. In fact, most Democrats seem to believe that government debt is not much of a crisis at all.
Our politicians love to talk about “cutting the budget”, but nothing ever gets done. Both parties have been promising us “fiscal responsibility” for decades but both parties have never delivered.
Sadly, the American people have not held our politicians responsible for this.
This latest episode just reveals how much of a joke Washington D.C. has become. In the 8 days leading up to the “historic” $38.5 billion budget deal, the U.S. national debt increased by $54.1 billion dollars.
Our politicians are standing by and doing nothing while the financial future of this nation is being destroyed right in front of our eyes. It is now being projected that by the year 2021, interest payments on the national debt will amount to $1.1 trillion dollars a year.
Fortunately, some bloggers out there are starting to wake up to just how pathetic this latest “budget deal” really was.
For instance, Tim Fernholz of the National Journal recently posted the following….
For example, the final cuts in the deal are advertised as $38.5 billion less than was appropriated in 2010, but after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds, and reductions in mandatory spending programs, discretionary spending will be reduced only by $14.7 billion.
In fact, some conservative bloggers are becoming absolutely furious with the duplicity of the Republican party. In a recent article on Business Insider, John Ellis really let John Boehner have it….
It turns out that the budget agreement that all parties were hailing this past weekend as a “great achievement” is in fact a joke. Any Republican who was elected with even a sliver of Tea Party support is now duty-bound to vote against it on Friday. Every 2012 Republican presidential hopeful is now duty-bound to demand that it be voted down.
But Boehner is already saying that it is time to “move on” and that he is really going to “get tough” during the next battle. Boehner is claiming that the “war” over the debt ceiling is going to be about “trillions” instead of “billions”.
The American people are certainly in the mood for something to be done about our debt crisis. According to a new NBC/WSJ poll, the vast majority of Republicans and the vast majority of independents do not want the debt ceiling raised. Even Democrats are roughly split on the issue.
John Boehner is promising that the Republicans will not agree to raise the debt ceiling without “serious steps in the right direction”.
So what pathetically low number will cause John Boehner to cave in this time?
Obama is already taking a strong stand on the debt ceiling. He is demanding that the Republicans send him a “clean bill” and is warning that they must not “play politics” with U.S. government finances.
On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney stated that “the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling would be Armageddon-like in terms of the economy.”
You know what? To a certain degree Carney is right. If the U.S. government hits the debt ceiling the financial markets will likely go haywire. That would cause the big boys up on Wall Street to start putting tremendous pressure on Boehner. There is no way that Boehner would watch chaos unfold on Wall Street and not end up flinching.
Not that Boehner was ever serious about cutting the federal deficit. He was not serious about it during the Bush years and he is not serious about it now.
This is all just a whole lot of political theater.
Meanwhile, most Americans are not even paying attention to all of the financial fraud being committed by the “fourth branch of government”.
Of course the Federal Reserve is not actually part of the federal government at all. But they do get to spend trillions and lend trillions without ever having to get the approval of Congress, the president or the American people.
For example, most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has been handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in nearly risk-free loans to their friends and even to the wives of their friends.
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve is above the law and is not accountable to anyone. In fact, we can’t even get our politicians to authorize a comprehensive audit of their books.
The truth is that our system is soaked in so much fraud that there is no way that it will ever recover.
We have turned our backs on the principles of our founding fathers and so now we pay the price.
The U.S. national debt is now over 14 times larger than it was 30 years ago and it is currently rising by well over 4 billion dollars every single day. This debt will destroy our financial system. We are stealing the future from our children and our grandchildren.
It is so sad to see what is happening to America.
So what do all of you think about what is going on in Washington D.C.? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….