How far will those in power be able to kick the can down the road before the music eventually stops? How much longer can they continue to keep up a charade of stability before the SHTF in every way? How much tighter must the shackles be before the masses learn the awful truth of their enslavement? As the ship of state founders upon the rocks of entitlements and political patronage, those ensconced in the wheelhouse redouble efforts, though not to save the vessel which they already know is doomed. Rather, fearing mutiny and revolt from its hordes of passengers they pass stiffer and more draconian penalties for anybody who dares to suggest an alternate state of affairs than the 'approved' storyline. And even as they exempt themselves from the new rules they check and recheck their own life-boats.
Help yourself to a few servings of reality - the debts are well past the point of ever being repayable! The system can do very little other than continue to crumble under the weight of its unsustainability. There is really no way out but to repudiate the mountains of unpayable debt, then start from scratch! Of course, if your major creditor is removed from the scene there is no one left to collect your IOU's. In other words does the road to Beijing pass through Tehran? Starting to make a bit more sense now?
Looking at the numbers behind our federal budgets reveals that
the majority of our government’s spending goes not to running the day to
day operations of government, but rather, to social safety net programs
like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, welfare, food assistance,
rental stipends and a host of other entitlement programs. In many cases,
the programs themselves are used as a marketing tool during election
campaigns, with the winner of an election often being the candidate who
promises the most benefits to their constituents.
While this strategy of indirect vote buying has worked well for
politicians on both sides of the aisle for many decades, and has been
instrumental in ushering in an era of centrally planned economies and
expansion of government influence on the individual lives of American
citizens, it is as Bill Whittle suggests (video below), an unsustainable system that will ultimately fail.
It’s generally true that the people who receive the most
in benefits pay little or nothing in taxes, so people are voting
themselves other peoples’ money. It’s not just a vote pump. It’s a
wealth redistribution pump, and it pumps $2.2 trillion every single year
from people who work and pay taxes to people who often don’t work and
don’t pay any taxes.
As long as the benefit receivers can outvote the benefit producers
there will be more and more people taking, and fewer and fewer people
working harder and harder to produce those benefits. That’s exactly what
we’re seeing today.
…
We face a choice. One option is to cut back on this [entitlement]
food supply and gradually but firmly reduce this entitlement dependence
to what it was originally intended to be: help for those, who through
illness or physical incapacity, cannot help themselves, and return
everyone else feeding on this supply from the wealth consumer column to
the wealth generator column. That is going to be very, very, very
difficult to do.
Or, we can let this continue until the system collapses, and that’ll
be sooner rather than later, and much sooner than many of you think.
Then there won’t be any benefits at all.
There is certainly something to be said for the ethical and moral
obligations of an advanced modern-day society with respect to taking
care of those who cannot care for themselves, or those who have
experienced a short-term medical or employment emergency. But providing
extended womb-to-tomb safety nets and entitlement programs for those who
are perfectly capable of working a productive job but refuse to do so,
or for those who make poor personal budgetary choices, leads to the
inevitable outcome in which everyone eventually realizes that they’d be
better of by simply collecting their income from the government.
We are at the point in America where there really is no turning back.
While Mr. Whittle’s solution of drastically cutting back these types of
nanny-state expenses is a sound one, it is simply not politically
feasible for individual politicians. In today’s America, the idea of
cutting back on social expenditures and facilitating a return to
individual responsibility is political suicide for incumbents, and a
non-starter for those wishing to enter the political arena as first time
candidates.
Moreover, eliminating these types of expenses is simply not going to be possible without massive social upheaval.
Consider what would happen if you cut supplemental food assistance by
50%, or eliminated extensions of emergency unemployment insurance, or,
heaven forbid, you take away access to the millions of Obama Phones that will be distributed this year. We are now so far gone that entitlement cuts to the federal
budget will have the same catastrophic impact on society as will the
eventual collapse of the monetary, financial and economic systems when
our creditors finally stop lending us money. It’s a catch 22
and both options lead to the same end result. Thus, for Congressional
representatives who control our budget, the choice is simple: kick the can down the road to keep the system from completely destabilizing for as long as possible.
When the money runs out – and it will, because China, Russia, Japan
and the rest of our lenders know we’re a lost cause – the entitlement
system in America will fall apart, leaving tens of millions of people
without any way to meet their basic needs.
Once this new paradigm becomes apparent you can fully expect riots in the streets - bloodshed, starvation, martial law – all of the worst case scenarios you’ve imagined.
The system is coming unhinged and the math is all the proof you need.
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