Pax Americana

Cartoon by BALOO

We're running out of money.  No, I don't blame only Obama for it, though he's done his level best to waste as much money as possible. It's a walrus and carpenter thing.  This has been going on for decades, and the liberal/neocon theory is, apparently, that we can just keep going deeper into debt till the end of time.  When a family gets into too much debt, it has to reorganize, cut out some luxuries, figure out how to earn more and/or spend less.  I really don't think the rules should change at the national level.  The consensus among actual economists seems to be that raising taxes on any part of the population will make the economy stagnate even more, so the consequence of a tax hike could quite conceivably be less revenue, not more.

So, if we assume that the Government can't rationally get much more revenue, what can we conclude?  Yes.  It has to spend less money.  They say that foreign aid is a drop in the bucket, but buckets of water are made of drops.  Could we at least stop giving foreign aid to countries that give foreign aid to other countries?  Like Israel and Russia. Just another wild and crazy right-wing thought.

Of course we can't do that, because a lot of foreign aid money enriches financiers and banks right here in the USA, so it's the usual flow.  Joe Sixpack pays taxes to Washington, Washington gives it away overseas, and Goldman-Sachs makes still more money.

And we certainly can't cut entitlement programs.  If we didn't have heaps of freebies programs, we might not get enough illegal aliens coming in to provide cheap scab labor for the same big shots.  So that's a no-go.

I guess we can cut the military.  They're overpaid for the four or five or whatever wars they're fighting all over the world, and it would be good for the troops to live on less money so we can keep the trough open for the layabouts here at home. Veterans are potential terrorists anyway, or so says Janet Napolitano.

All this is said more calmly by Pat Buchanan HERE.  And with more commentary at American Conservative HERE.