CruisingDad,
I happen to agree with your assessment that the fundamentals remain badly damaged, and are far from on the mend if not continuing to get worse. So I understand your pessimism. And I tend to agree that things will get much worse if we continue along this course.
We got into this mess by progressively leveraging nearly every sector of our multi-faceted society -- federal and state governments, businesses, and individuals. That trend played nicely into the hands of an enduring aspect of capitalistic society -- the necessary evils known as corporate and personal greed. Everyone with influence -- from self-interested labor union bosses to smarmy K-Street lobbyists to slimy politicians to the worst of all Wall Street Money Grabbers -- took advantage of the loose credit and investors' faith to line their own pockets as thickly and quickly as possible. Short term gain above all else!
The American middle class seems to have paid the highest price for the run up. Hard work and savings, invested in good faith, erased almost overnight. But not the debts simultaneously incurred. It is a bitter lesson for many, but one my own parents and others of their generation could have easily foretold: There is no such thing as a get-rich quick scheme. Money doesn't grow on trees - it comes from years of hard work and savings.
That is, unless you work on Wall Street -- where the money grab continues unabated and
annual bonuses flow like mega-jackpot lottery payouts. Bonuses paid by skimming a cut from middle class retirement investments, and of course from bail-out money.
The news gets worse for middle class Americans. With Obama at the helm, and a complicit Congress, in just half a year the annual federal deficit has MORE THAN
QUADRUPLED from the record deficits of the Bush years. The
National Debt increases by another million dollars every twenty seconds or so. The Obama Administration has requested that the current national debt ceiling of $12.1T be raised yet again. And the Administration's own OMB now estimates that the cost to american taxpayers of Obama's political agenda will add an additional $9T+ by 2019 to the national debt.
Which will put us well over $20T well before the end of the next decade. That amounts to better than $65,000 of national debt for every american man woman and child. The figure would be scarier still if it was calculated per family. And if it included state as well as local debt. To say nothing of personal debt.
Most of us understand that the very first remedy for overspending is to cut spending. We all live by this code within the confines of our modest family budgets. In the sometimes complex realm of economic quantitative analysis, it is an elegantly simple solution: Spend no more than you have. And preferably a bit less, thereby allowing some savings.
Incredibly, our elected leaders still fail to grasp this -- even after a monumental financial meltdown caused by excess and crushing leverage. Remarkably, their remedy for debt-induced recession is more debt. It is as though our elected officials are congenitally incapable of balancing their own checkbook, much less the national ledger.
Worse still, even with massive long-term shortfalls projected for current entitlement programs, there are those who seek to expand the federal government by offering up additional costly entitlements. This before we have even figured out how to pay the future obligations for the ones we already have. Or paid off the notes incurred for essential government services already rendered.
Insurmountable doom, you say.
Maybe. Or not.
We can throw our hands up in the air and give up. Or get distracted by pointing fingers and laying blame all over the place -- there's more than enough to spread around -- and that's exactly what our so-called leaders would like nothing better than for us to do. Assigning blame is useful only so far as it helps us understand the origins of the underlying problem. But those origins are already well understood: Debt.
Debt is the problem. But I emphatically disagree that nothing can be done about it. It is not too late. We still have a chance to wrest the helm from those that would ruin us in shoal waters. We can tack this ship of state and change course.
The bottom line is that as individuals in a free society we are ultimately responsible for our own fate. We still have a chance to alter course.
Despite all the campaign propaganda and cute slogans, we ende dup with more of the same in the last election. MUCH more of the same. Or perhaps we should call them "more of the shame".
We need new leaders. We can replace the current crop of spenders. We can elect a responsive and financially responsible government.
There is a national election to be decided in 14 months. I would encourage everyone to support candidates -- regardless of party affiliation -- that pledge to make the reduction of our national debt their number #1 priority. Not "one" of many number one priorities (as we have at the moment). THE #1 priority.
Bit by bit, dollar by dollar, we can get ahead of this. Yes, it
will take decades, not to mention a sea-change in how we manage our financial affairs, as a country and individually. It will take hard work, sacrifice, and discipline -- virtues with which Americans of past generations were amply endowed. Virtues I'm certain we still possess, if only latently.
It will be a long, hard, beat to weather. But our ship is weatherly, and our crew though green is strengthened by the knowledge that their forebears have endured and overcome greater adversity. We are prepared to do what must be done, and lack nothing but steady command at the helm -- the sort that doesn't cower at the sight of a lee shore or run for harbor at the first hint of storm clouds, but instead reefs down smartly, bears up, and sets a steady course to windward.