By: Gerald Harris
The United States Congress and President Barak Obama have decided in their infinite wisdom that money does grow on trees. They must have come to that conclusion because they are spending cash like there is no end in sight for new money to be made. They must have a very large and fast printing machine because for just one trillion dollars it would take you at a dollar a second, 31,000 years to have a trillion dollars. That means for the government to come up with a trillion dollars they have to print far more than a dollar a second to have a trillion dollars by the end of this fiscal year. They will need that much for their new stimulus bill and other fiscal insanity.
The national debt is at about $12.5 trillion today and by the end of this fiscal year it will be very near $14 trillion. The congresswomen and men just recently raised the national debt to $14 trillion and that will be surpassed early in the next fiscal year. The fiscal year for the United States for some reason runs from October 1 through September 30 each year. The present interest on the debt is $600 million a day and that is with extremely low interest rates. You can buy a treasury bill and get .14% interest on your money today. But that’s not hard to believe, when a local bank in LaMoure wasn’t embarrassed to keep care of my money for just a half percent interest. That is another story, the interest rate that is eating up the savings of the people of this nation.
The federal government is now working on a national health care plan that they say will cost about a trillion dollars over ten years. That probably is a very low guess on their part but even if it is true they don’t have any money to pay for it. The people in congress and the president think they should take money from future generations to pay for the health care of the people that don’t have health insurance now. The stimulus bill that the congresspeople are working on will also be passed with no way to pay for it and it will probably cost us another trillion by the time it is done with. The present stimulus bill that is in effect has had a very minor impact on the economy at this point and most of the impact is short term. The feds have done little to take care of long tern financial needs of this country, like cutting spending at all levels of the federal government, even if its my area.
For one thing they could cut a huge amount out of the military budget just by bringing the troops home from all over the world, including Afghanistan and Iraq. We helped both countries get rid of rigid dictatorial governments so now its time they took over their own governmental operation including police and military work.
A second thing that they could do to get the spending under control is to end all unnecessary programs of which there are many, including earmarks and they could freeze all the rest of the government spending at the present level and keep it frozen until the income matches the expenditures. There is no need to increase taxes because we don’t really need any more programs. Even in cases like flooding in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, those people would have to solve their own problems not rely on the federal government. That is probably the biggest problem we have, relying on the federal government for our survival and not ourselves.
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“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Sir Winston Churchill