Fiscal Responsibility
We must return to Bill Clinton’s philosophy of fiscal responsibility.
We must have only social and foreign policies that we can afford!
We must balance the budget, on average, every year and have a realistic plan of paying back our $19 trillion dollar nation debt. We must do this now! We must have a plan to leave our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren a healthy economy.
We are destroying the earth.
The party that is supporting Existential Eddie is the newly created Responsibility Party. All citizens must now be grown ups! We must take responsibility for the well being of the planet. We must leave a good world for our descendants.
Spoiled Children
The Responsibility Party is directly contradictory to the Democratic and Republican parties who have the political policies of spoiled children: we want it all; we want it now; we don’t care about other people, and we don’t care about future generations.
A National Policy of Responsibility
We can erect a Statue of Responsibility in the San Francisco Bay the same size as the Statue of Liberty.
This statue will make concrete our belief that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. And the name of this coin is Truth.
This statue will symbolize our commitment of responsibility for every freedom.
An Immoral Government
For over 200 years the United States followed a deep-seated belief in financial responsibility. The government always held that it was immoral to spend money we don’t have and then pass the debt onto future generations. Then came President Reagan who had the philosophy that “deficits don’t matter.” He accumulated more debt than all the other presidents before him combined! Then he got re-elected. When he left office he was still very popular. The National Airport got named after him and many political conservatives — who used to believe in balanced budgets – still treat him as an economic hero. During his presidency the economy boomed and millions of jobs were created.
And future generations were handed a three trillion dollar debt, which has no plans to be paid off. Reagan proved that –in the short run – deficits don’t matter.
The all presidents since Reagan did the same. Except Clinton. Clinton created a budget surplus (by embezzling Medicare funds) and actually had a plan of paying off the debt. But this was only a brief respite in immorality before President Bush II borrowed trillions more. And he got re-elected!! Deficits don’t matter.
Then President Obama picked up to banner of immorality and ratcheted up the debt as twice the rate that Bush did. He added $10 trillion to the national debt with the battle cry: “You didn’t complain when Bush ran up the debt, so don’t complain when I do.”
Now the debt is $19 trillion dollars with no plan of ever paying it back. Paul Ryan’s economic plan – which is the most conservative of all the plans – doesn’t even plan to balance the budget for 30 years!! There is not even a mention of paying anything back.
The financial cost of the interest on this debt to every taxpayer (those in the top 50% who actually pay federal taxes) is around $3,000 a year at the present 1% interest rate. When the rate goes up to 3%, which is the historical average, the average cost per taxpayer will be $6,000 per year. If the rate goes up to 6%, which it is now in countries like Spain and Greece, the average rate per taxpayer will be $12,000 per year. They will pay this for the rest of their lives. These interest payments are only for $19 trillion debt. It will soon be $20 trillion, and there is no limit of the debt for those politicians who believe that deficits don’t matter.
There is an intense national debate about the causes of the moral decline in the country. Perhaps one of the main causes is the immorality is the government’s lack of fiscal responsibility — and the people who vote for this government. The gross immorality is the government spending money it doesn’t have, and then passing the bill onto their children. And then projecting the guilt onto the scapegoat.
An Illegal Government
Even though not technically illegal, there seems to be something illegal about taking the earnings from the next generation. A reasonable estimate of how much the upper 50% taxpayer will pay on interest is around $5,000 a year for his/her entire life. Suppose the taxpayer’s working life is 40 years. This amounts to $200,000 the current generation is taking from that worker. If you multiply this $200,000 by the 70 million taxpayers who actually pay federal taxes, this amounts to $14 trillion dollars this generation is taking from the future generation. And this is not including all the debt that will be added in the next 30 years!
This makes Bernie Madow look like a boy scout.
The moral and legal imperative is clear. We must not only balance the budget, but begin to pay back the debt, regardless of the effect it has on the economy, on world events, or on society. The only exception to this moral imperative is if there is an emergency, such as World War II or the depression, and society has a realistic and clear plan of paying back the borrowed money in the near future. And we have not had such a plan since Ronald Reagan declared that “deficits don’t matter.”