United States Fiscal Insanity

To The Editor:
The stats tell the story – economy in the toilet. All the recent spending that many people support has truly done nothing. An informative book is “New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America” by Professor Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College. Hillsdale takes the Constitution seriously. Every Hillsdale student is required to study the constitution during freshman year.
Before the Great Depression, history shows that our nation combated economic downturns (1837, 1893, and 1921) best when it cut government spending and reduced taxes. This gave citizens disposable income and businesses investment money. This formula along with a tincture-of-time and voila the economy would come back without a lot of government debt. This is precisely what Andrew Mellon, the US Secretary of the Treasury, advised in the early 1920’s. And it worked – Ever heard of the “Roaring Twenties.”
The Great Depression was “Great” precisely because the FDR Administration deviated so far from this prescription of cutting government. In contrast to Mr. Mellon, FDR’s disillusioned Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his diary in 1939 about a conversation he had with Congressmen Robert Doughton and Jere Cooper of the House Ways and Means Committee, “Now gentlemen, we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. … We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot!” Kind of describes today.
Military spending is always an issue. Often defense cuts are advocated in order to grow social programs. The fact is that with the passage of time, Defense has become a smaller part of the US budget. In the 1950’s it was roughly half of the budget, today it is about 20 percent. That sounds like it’s coming down, at least in proportion to the overall budget. It is slowly being dwarfed by social spending. Military spending is discretionary. It has been cut several times just within my lifetime. Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior, Bill Clinton/
Conversely, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are mandatory spending and make up the bulk of the budget — over half. http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Obama-budget-2011.html
Social Security this year has more money going out than it has coming in. And the dirty little secret is that it has been used to pad the budget for years now: “Locked Box?” As Baby-Boomers retire Social Security will go more and more into the RED and the overall budget along with it – a fiscal disaster in the making. A former U.S. Comptroller-General, David Walker, is a wonderful source for this information. You can find him on Youtube.com.
People, through their everyday transactions, are the economy. When politicians tax and spend their money, people loose their freedom and politicians gain power. The deficits for the last seven years have roughly been in billions 462, 347, 260 165, 455, 1400 and 1350. Those last two figures are actually 1.4 and 1.35 trillion. See a trend! A child born today owes over $42, 000 as his share of the national debt – Got freedom? An excellent website for fiscal issues is http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/ .
For a quick glimpse of the coming disaster go to http://usdebtclock.org/. For a very detailed look, go to http://www.gao.gov/financial/fy2009/09frusg.pdf . On page 177, you will read “The total resources needed for all the programs sums to $107 trillion in present value terms.” This figure is 75 years out – scary, all the same.
PHILLIP DRISCOLL
Villas