Futzing around. The National Debt Crisis. My Predictions.
By Gene W. Edwards. Posted 1/20/2023.
I predict it’ll be three weeks before the House Republicans pass a bill to raise our national debt limit (again). Meanwhile, our economy is in a Derek Chauvin breath-hold.
You see, we’ve borrowed 31.4+ trillion dollars from ourselves and others, altogether, and you can’t buy lunch if you don’t have any money. Thankfully, our Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, has promised to juggle the books until as long as early June, borrow money from Peter to pay Paul, until Congress extends the debt limit.
We need the extension for money we already allocated for this and that. The argument, instead, should be, “How can we construct a national budget for the next fiscal year [October 2023 through September 2021] that doesn’t run in the red” so that the national debt limit has to be extended again, and again, and again, some 80X since 1929 and the shattering stock market crash then. For now, we must shatter the debt ceiling again, now.
(1) Money also pours of this country to countries selling products to us. This is called our U.S. Trade Deficit, now running 1.2 trillion dollars a year.
(2) We are also in danger from our 644 trillion dollars of currency and credit derivatives someday creating a thunderous, world economy, crash.
The general public knows nothing about either one.
Meanwhile, our grandkids stir restlessly in their beds, dreaming of dehydrated sugar plums and of Santa Claus ending up in an old folks’ home.
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Our present Republican House is a Titanic disaster of the inmates running the asylum, the Jim Jordan/Matt Goetz crowd. Everything they touch turns to doo-doo.
I predict Kevin McCarthy will be House Speaker two years in all, the weakest House speaker in anyone’s memory, bent only on self-ambition, and then the Republicans will lose 10 seats in the House in the 2024 General Election and the Democrats will take it over. That would sentence McCarthy to become House Minority Leader, at best, after that. Demographics and leaderless limbo ineptitude impels the Republicans to lose their shirts then, a day late and a dollar short.
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And now we come to the issue, or inevitability, of our nation going into debt default — I suspect within 24–36 months. Let’s see what I “get,” intuitively:
“A high sugar [free money] diet leads to death. Common sense tells us you can’t keep spending more than you make. Restraints required. A giant debt bubble is set to burst in 2025. Not so far away! Be aware that Congress does not have the resolve to restrain public spending. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Imagine a country without a working currency system! That’s the nightmare waiting to happen. Be dutiful in acquiring resources for yourself of food, water, “protection,” like-minded friends, a remote refuge , and a high consciousness that can ride out any circumstance. I do not see this picture changing.”
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Here’s a chart of how public debt (borrowing) has been increasing since the markets crashed in 1929: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287
The chart moves from billions to trillions. If you go to usdebtclock.org, you can see today’s figure of national debt: 31.5 trillion dollars. That’s $31,500,000,000,000, a figure which equals 157.5 rows of $100 bills laid end-to-end from the earth to the moon! (250,000 miles times 8,000 bills per mile X 100 = 1/5th trillion, so five rows = one trillion; 31.5 trillion X 5 trips to the moon per trillion = 157.5 rows. Yeah, the moon only averages 239,000 miles, not 250,000, and there are only 7.920 eight-inch bills in a mile, not 8,000. I only rounded off a tiny bit. Blink a couple of times and our public debt will equal another $100 bill moon shot!
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Our public debt didn’t even hit one trillion until and after the Reagan Administration during its years of 1981–1982. Is it tax cuts that broke the bank, or was it a free-money philosophy of party-until-you-drop? Our national debt doubled just since 2011, in relative peacetime.
I am sounding an alarm here! A moratorium must occur on any new or increased federal spending. Defense spending must be cut. Enact no new entitlement spending. May I ask, why are we waging a proxy war for cheap and cowardly Western Europe in Ukraine against Russia. the formula for World War III? Ukraine was/is nowhere close to be qualified to be a member of NATO. And the sanctions don’t work; they backfired.
We need millions of legal immigrants to pay taxes and shore up our economy. Care to apply?
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I have presented a plan. Here it is again. It’s not really a Republican plan, nor is it a Democrat plan. It is a USA plan. Here it is:
(1) Tax less, (2) spend less, (3) regulate less, (4) but however you do it, balance the budget (forgotten about long ago!), (5) question and avoid foreign interventionism and foreign alliances, (6) avoid war and any international arms trade and arms use at almost all cost, (7) promote American energy, the cleaner the better, (8) protect family, patriotic, Constitutional, and Christian values (but not at the cost of freedom!), and: (9) draft House bills one at a time, not unread omnibus bills full of pork, waste, and haste, both parties! Add: (10) “Made in America!” (almost forgotten about for decades), and (11) let’s pay back our national debt, doing so quickly rather than slowly!
How about doing something big, something new, such as abolish the IRS and go to a national end-use sales tax? How about taxing all our weekday billions of stock trades a little bit and allocating all that revenue to paying back the national debt, as well as also increasing the capital gains tax to 20% for its measly 15%, which rewards billionaires, also using that to retire our national debt? How about capping individual income to five million dollars a year after all taxes are paid, taxing the excess by 50%, or all of it. Who needs more that?! How about super-taxing, or boycotting, our businesses that have moved abroad, when our/their products come to our shores, thus incentivizing them to return? How about restructuring our graduated income tax levels so that the super-rich pay their share towards the American dream, the country of the cities of lights where there could be quality food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education for all — if we don’t go bust from overdoing it? Both political parties and the American people must understand that not generating elements of such remedial plans means our train of government will derail and fall off the high bridge; USA goodbye.
A debt crisis is coming that is unlike anything this country has ever experienced, an unimaginable level of want, a waking nightmare of unsustainability, and the dissolution of the American dream of free capitalism and social-climbing competition, our wretched excess of rich opportunity vs. our poor 50%.
No mon, no fun!
Love,
Gene.
Posted, 1/20/2023, on my blogsite, genewedwards.medium.com, run by the blog giant, Medium.com. Become a Follower of mine there. I’ll also post this on Facebook.
Coming soon. I will look at the big, big picture. The war on Russia. Putin’s health? The USA’s present trajectory. The stock market. World War III? A nuclear accident or nuclear arms use? Gold/silver price. And whatever else comes up. –Gene.