Whose Money Is It, Ours or Government’s?

To the Editor:
The government owes you $2,600,000,000,000.
Well, not personally, just every man, woman and child in the U.S. Count the zeros. That is $2.6 trillion our government has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund and into which it has deposited IOU’s to be paid in the “future.”
One obvious question: If the government can only operate by taxing its citizens, aren’t We The People going to have to redeem those IOUs? Do they think we’re idiots? The answer, of course, is yes they do. They want us to repay ourselves with our own money.
A reasonable person might ask, “Wait a minute. I never agreed to this confiscation. I want my money.” Well, it’s simple, you can’t have it. Just to meet its current obligations, the government borrows an incredible $58,000 a second, 365 days a year and $0.41 for every $1 it spends. Even more ridiculous is that the soon-to-be-maxed-out $14.3-trillion deficit ceiling will have to be increased by Aug. 2. That is the reason for all the demagoguery coming from Washington these days, each political party blaming the other and unwilling to admit that they were complicit in its growth and our economy is in a death spiral that cannot be sustained.
The problem started in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson had a vision for America he called “The Great Society,” a utopia in which all the ills of society would be cured by government intervention, aka profligate spending.
Poverty would be eliminated. There would be full employment. Everyone would have safe, adequate housing. The only fly in Johnson’s ointment was that he had no money for that kind of pump priming. Then, like a bolt from the blue, it came to him. Sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund were billions of dollars that were set aside to pay benefits to current and future retirees. Johnson, being a typical Alfred E. Neumann, ”What, Me Worry?” type of free spending Democrat, immediately got congressional approval to tap into what was thought to be a bottomless pit of money.
Predictably, the reserve was gone by 1983 and the “pay-as-you-go” system ended on Sept. 30, 2010 when the Trust Fund officially began paying out more money than it receives. Here is one example from the Congressional Budget Office: revenues in 2010 totaled $2.162 trillion: individual income taxes of $899 billion and Social Security-Social Insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) taxes of $865 billion comprised 82% of the total, with corporate taxes ($191), excise taxes ($67) and other taxes ($140) making up the remaining 18 percent.
However, that $2.162 trillion wasn’t enough; the government spent $3.456 trillion, a difference of $1.294 trillion which included $660 billion of “discretionary” spending, money that might have been saved if politicians had the courage to deny bailouts to bankrupt car manufacturers, insurance companies, brokerage houses and the non-stimulating, not quite “shovel ready” Economic Stimulus Bill that has kept unemployment above 9 percent for two years. The Democrats want to increase taxes to continue funding wasteful programs like these.
The Republicans contend that we don’t have a tax problem. We have a spending problem. The question is: who is going to win this argument?
Obama’s ideological vision of a hyper-liberal, arrogant, overreaching, intrusive government drowning in $1.2 trillion annual deficits over the foreseeable future is a recipe for economic disaster. We must decide if we want to give more power and more of our money to Washington. Or, do we insist that government must live within a budget just as we do?
Remember, it’s not their money, it belongs to us.
GERALD F. STAHLECKER
Seaville