The Days of Reckoning.
The Years of The Downward Spiral.
Maybe we think we won’t be around to see the mess. Or that we can use our gift of gab to talk our way out of reality. We don’t get it because we’ve never dealt with this problem before. Like Scarlett O’Hara, we’ll “think about it tomorrow”… all the while hoping that Tomorrow will not arrive on our watch. And so far our magic thinking has worked.
Government programs — and government itself — have grown until they are, as the Comptroller General of the Government Accounting Office says, “a cancer.” Spending has increased for generations. In due time, the socialist utopian thinking of the Boomers, that curséd group of entitlement addicts, will bring the social order crashing down upon their descendants — upon those descendants they didn’t abort, anyway. We could certainly use those forty million children they didn’t allow life or liberty; those kids could have helped carry this burden.
The descendants we do have are going to be stretched mighty thin to take care of the mess after the Boomers have let go the reins.
David Walker, the CG, makes an emphatic point near the end of this video: anyone who has done their homework, who knows history, and who has a grasp of the math involved knows the depth of this coming misery.
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This is not a rightwing/leftwing problem. This is an equal opportunity moral and fiscal disaster. Our children and grandchildren will curse our profligacy, and well they should.
There aren’t many comments on this video yet. Maybe there won’t be. After all, many people don’t grasp the economy of their own lives, much less the enormous amounts of our money that government feels compelled to confiscate, calling it (as Obama does) “revenue”.
Meanwhile, individuals in the US live in debt up to their eyebrows and hope for better times by and by. As if the Lending Fairy were going to rescue them from their dumb choices.
A few of the comments:
- This is not just an Issue for America, Europe has the same problem coming up very fast, and here we are also pumping in a mostly unproductive immigrant population adding to the problems.
- Great post. Very scary too. Funny how it’s not talked about in main stream media (MSM).
- whoa, this is scary. i’m 30 now and by the time i’m able to get medicare, it will all be gone
- They [politicians? The MSM? — not clear whom he means] do get it but they don’t care because they are the ones making the money. Our government has been hijacked.
- I remember hearing this guy when he was a guest on the Jerry Doyle Show a couple weeks back. Yeah, this should be a major concern for politicians, but they’re just sweeping it under the rug. Oh! And China! Good God!!!
What the Comptroller General says is ignored by those who are in a position to inform average Americans. Instead of doing their duty, these “journalists” create scandal about public lives in order attract audiences by ramping up a kind of artificial, vicarious excitement. And readers seem to want to be distracted rather than informed.
Here’s the Government Accounting Office website. I recommend looking around. For example, they have a report entitled “Various Issues Led to the Termination of the United States-Canada Shared Border Management Pilot Project”. I didn’t stop to read it, but it does look intriguing.
Meanwhile, we'd better prepare our children...
17 comments:
I think this is going to be one of the biggest stories of the century, that and the treason our governments commited against us by importing half the third world!
This is a moral crisis, of greed and amaxing selfishness and shortsightedness on our behalf(our meaning westerners)
As you say we are morgaging our children and grandchildren away to the greedy dispicable amoral bankers who will quite happily see us enslaved for generations to come.
However this could be good in the long term, a silver lining if you will. Once we are bankrupt, we will have to start again, this time, hopfully without as much of the fraud today,s system involves.
Also, if we have nothing what are the Muslims and Africans going to do? with no work for many years and hard times, hopefuly they will go home. No welfare, no free health, no free education, may mean no immigration and no hostile non-westerners.
oops, sorry for the terrible spelling, am balancing my laptop on my knees
Well, those with at least average intelligence could see this coming a long time ago. It's inevitable, so let's have the crash now and be done with it. And no, it's not just North America, it's in Europe as well. Maybe a crash is needed to change things. We should focus on providing what little intellectual guidance we can.
Thanks for the reminder. I had seen this a while back, but when it is not an immediate catastrophe it is easy to forget about it. Our politicians love to ignore it.
We are in for some very tough times in the coming decades. If the "leaders" in Washington had stuck to the limitations imposed by the U.S. constitution we would be in this mess, but that horse has already left the barn.
Some ideas:
1. Require every new law passed by Congress to show the exact area in the constitution that allows it. (I know the "common welfare" clause is a gaping hole, but it's a start.) Remember, the constitution was written to limit the federal government, not the states and individuals.
2. Enforce all immigration laws severely. This might really do a great job in lowering health care and welfare costs.
3. Require the U.S. government to publish it's ACTUAL cash flow each year. It might scare people into action.
4. Cut foreign aid to zero.
5. Establish an X-Prize" type reward for people who successfully challenge federal government programs as unconstitutional.
6. Do NOT vote for a Democrat or RINO.
Not bad for a few minutes. Anybody have some more ideas?
Yep, we're headed for a day of reckoning, and although we've been hearing about it since the eighties, it will come to the spendthrift West. However, it is not all the fault of the boomers; they didn't create the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs that account (in the U.S.) for most of the gov't spending.
Dang, I must proofread!
"stuck to the limitations imposed by the U.S. constitution we would NOT be in this mess"
I smell B.S. We all remember what happened with Al Gore and his latest "Pravda."
Excellent geopolitical blogger Fabius Maximus writes extensively about this, but stands out from ordinary bloggers by carefully referencing sources.
Rejoice, postmodernism is about to perish, and tremble, for a new age of the world comes.
I don't understand the problem with this, 8-tril on healthcare is basically writing a check to yourself. Nowhere outside high academia, cutting edge pharma, and resourced care benefits. Other countries may not have any of these but at least they appreciate that older people have something to offer.
This is maybe THE most liberating video I've seen in my entire life! As a nurse working in the Norwegian health care system, namely the Intensive Care Unit (icu) at the local hospital, I am stunned to see what efforts we make to keep people alive! Just listen to this, a 98 year old lady was given a pacemaker, 80-90 year olds have no problem getting bypas surgery, the same old people are intubated and cared for at the icu, costing about 2200£ a day! For a pneumonia! Noone seems to think that you probably should die when you reach this age. Everybody keeps talking about the ethics, about people's right to stay alive, their right to treatment etc, but very few talks about the fact that you want to die when you come of this age, cause all yourfriends have, and Alsheimerz is on its way. When the city of Trondheim's chief of health care couldn't cover for more than 270 unstaffed shifts, nobody seemed able to connect the dots between the enourmous expencive effort at keeping premature born babies, drug addicts, extremely old people and other chronically ill patients alive, on the expence of a shrinking population. The response is usually that we are dependant on immigration to solve the problem, like that got us anywhere.
I don't understand the problem with this, 8-tril on healthcare is basically writing a check to yourself.
Because it's a check we cannot cash; once the Boomers start to retire, the tax base shrinks--and as the tax base shrinks, the less the government is able to pay.
Indiscriminate open ended welfare programs combined with out of control immigration of the non-productive is unsustainable.
Encouraging women to have abortions in pursuit of career instead of the Palin model of having both career and family has resulted in a 40 million citizen deficit. The immigrant substitute is on the whole lousy, being self-selected and unqualified in the case of illegals, unproductive in the case of family reunification with elderly relatives, and in too many cases, a prolonged drain consuming ESL, Welfare and health care and social security without any significant financial contributions.
The simple math has been pointed out before: even if a young immigrant couple work all their lives and have say, two children, they will never cover the costs of bringing in their 4 elderly parents as consumers of other people's taxes.
Keep granny in her home country and let her own children send her support money or make them put up sequential hundred thousand dollar bonds to cover her costs in the US. Grant no rights merely for occupying US soil.
(Good luck with turning off that last tap with American judges who want to extend citizen rights even to terrorists apprehended fighting the US military in a foreign country).
Most of the damage to the wisdom of the constitution has been done by hubristic jurists whose intelligence is far lower than they think.
Enough with bashing the boomers already. I am sick and tired of it. Same as we cannot blame the Muslims for all of the problems with our own societies that let them freeload here. Us boomers did not invent the so called social programs that cost so damn much. No one has a right to retirement income, health care or not starving to death should they not want to work. No one. I for one would be glad to have all of the cash I have paid in supposed 'taxes' for "Social Security". Really. Give it back, I want it and I will sign on to never, ever asking for a handout from the Federal Gov't.
mikal13 - Some of us have living wills in place to not be in that position. I agree wholeheartedly. My Mom has been dead for almost 10 years and she had a living will in place that I had to enforce. No hanging on for her and she had a death that was timely. She was ready and said so.
It is time for us to make the hard choices:
Welfare becomes workfare
Health care becomes a pay as you go system again.
The borders become closed.
And that is the start of the list.
So many blame the US for the troubles but I'll tell you that should we take a year off - no foreign aid of any type for a year - things would change. The US is the engine that drives the world economy and we need to take that year off to drive the point home to those outside of the US that denigrate us constantly.
If the Western economies tank how many do you think are going to starve in the 2nd and 3rd world? A billion? Two? More? And you call us immoral? Please.
The Crash will be our 'fire in the hold'. Bring it on.
Irish tory,
"if we have nothing what are the Muslims and Africans going to do? with no work for many years and hard times, hopefuly they will go home. No welfare, no free health, no free education, may mean no immigration and no hostile non-westerners."
Look at Kosovo and Suriname. The lesson is: THEY NEVER LEAVE! At least not the problematic ones. Unless we do to them the same we did to Jews during the Middle ages.
I don't worry about this. We'll have some big, big troubles ahead. This, is just one of them.
Afonso
I'm not saying that they would definitly go home, the Africans would stay due to Africa being a toilet of a continent, but I bet there are many Arabs and Pakis and Iranians et al, who after losing all their benefits, sensing and experiencing resentment and anger from the natives, might just decide to go for a prolonged holiday back home!
This could be a sliver lining to what looks like the imminent bankrupcy of the west.
People with no money, who have to scrape by, would have to rethink many things, I would hope democracy, fraudulant capitalism, diversity and athiesm would be dealt a body blow.
This crisis may be what the west needs to wake up!
http://jadamkraft.blogspot.com/2008/10/polticians-and-media-personalities.html
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