Mac-Coleman

12 October 2013 –

What About Going Broke Don’t We Understand? 

Should we worry hugely about the ongoing government shutdown and the looming deadline for raising the debt ceiling?  I suggest that we should look past the screaming and sniping by politicians, bureaucrats, and media.  They divert our focus to the secondary issues, such as a specific sidelined government program or who was hurt by partisan exploitation.  They want us to avoid thinking about how the government—elected officials and agency bureaucrats—have spent us into a strategic crisis that only heroic means can resolve.   

The single biggest threat to the United States is that we the people, represented by our elected and bureaucratic officials, are spending ourselves into bankruptcy.  Self-absorbed economists natter bankruptcy into incomprehensible silliness; but, a simple presentation of the numbers should scare all sensible Americans. 

The federal government’s debt rose above one trillion dollars in the Reagan administration and has been rising at a geometric rate with each new generation of government.  If a family financial advisor were counseling today’s Uncle Sam, she would assess that he is a pander of expensive things to family members in exchange for docile perpetuation of family addictions.  The advisor then would search for a family member who has enough individual strength and maturity to take over the family finances. 

How bad is our problem?  Our government spends at about 25% more than it collects in taxes and has been doing so for several years.   The US government now owes more in unsecured debt—credit card debt to us every day people—than all 317 million Americans make every year.  Seventeen trillion dollars.  That is 17 with 12 zeroes behind it: $17,000,000,000,000.  The tipping point to national insolvency approaches.    

In the meantime, our elected officials hiss at each other across partisan ramparts.  They bemoan the uselessness and profligacy of Obamacare, the blatantly unconstitutional budgetary processes of the last five years, and who is the meanest in their governance.  However, they collectively are the uncle who blames anything and everybody but himself for his addiction.  The real and present danger to the United States is our national debt and the refusal of our elected officials to put on their big boy pants to stop the madness.      

Progressives ignore the importance of individual property rights and government thrift.  But these principles were important to our Founders.  To paraphrase the essayist John Jay Chapman’s famous quote about slavery, “There was never any moment in our history when slavery [to a large national debt] was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention [about government budgetary processes]. “  Alas, today, the Executive Branch and Congress have abandoned almost all constitutionally mandated budgetary processes.  The Executive Branch and its gargantuan regulatory agencies increasingly obligate and deny monies by fiat, and Congress allows them to do so.  The President has ignored his constitutional obligation to present a budget to Congress for consideration in the budgetary process, and Congress has allowed him to do so.  The Senate has refused to consider the myriad budget bills passed by the House, enabling the Executive Branch to rule by continuing resolution.  Continuing resolutions and executive fiat are sure-fire formula for wasting of vast amounts of our money. 

Does this self-induced mess really threaten our nation’s security?  I posit that our increasing federal debt is the greatest threat the United States has faced since the Civil War.  US government debt to other nations and to their financial institutions lessens our ability to make independent decisions in both domestic and international arena.  My years of working civil-military issues with allies, friends, and enemies, have taught me that durable sovereignty is the result of the deliberate use of all a nation’s instruments of national power.  Economic, military, internal political, and diplomatic power work together to sustain a nation’s sovereignty in the world.  The most important of these instruments, however, is economic power.  The other three instruments are effective only if they are sustained by a vibrant economy and an unencumbered government.  All national power collapses if a country loses control of its finances.  The Soviet Union’s economic collapse, quickly followed by its military and diplomatic collapse in 1989, should be a sobering example of what can happen to a corrupt “superpower.”  

We are on a similar road to ruin if we don’t revert to wisely established constitutional principles of economic governance:  present yearly budgets, debate them, balance them, enact them, and hold to them.  Anyone on either side of the aisle who is not faithful to that process is part of the problem and not part of the solution.