PrintApril 7, 2011
Shut It Down!
There should be no debate over spending in D.C. at this point. Over the last seventy years, our federal government, behaving as an unconstitutional supreme central power, has sent the most productive and prosperous nation on earth on the path toward third-world status.
Bickering over a few billion in planned deficit spending above $1.65 trillion in just the next year -- when the nation is already more than $14 trillion in unsustainable debt threatening the very existence of our dollar -- is the definition of insanity.
Democrats are forcing a so-called shutdown in their effort to keep spending money we don't have. Republicans are calling for only a symbolic level of spending cuts. Nobody in Washington, D.C. seems serious about ending the fiscal insanity. Even the president's bipartisan debt panel is recommending deficit spending for at least another twenty-five years.
I say, shut it down! The federal government has done as much to harm the union of states as it has ever done to improve freedom and liberty in America. We will be better off without a federal government, with each state able to fund and govern itself better than the Fed ever could.
Extreme threats demand extreme measures, and nothing threatens the future freedom and prosperity of the United States more than our own federal government. Enemies beyond, we can deal with. It's the enemy within which threatens us most today. It's time to shut it down and reset.
As we have proven in election after election, changing the players on the field from time to time does not change the game. We need a game-changer here, beginning with forcing our elected servants to live within the confines of the Constitution, existing laws, and the budget that we allow them.
Everything in this country seems backwards, upside-down, and inside-out. The people can never win a game in which they are not even a player. D.C. players make up the rules as they go, and those rules rarely benefit the people.
When Obama and the Democratic Socialists of America passed unconstitutional acts like ObamaCare; green-lighted Obama's czars; and authorized deep intrusions into private-sector banking, manufacturing, and education -- that's when Republicans should have shut it all down.
They simply didn't have the backbone to do what they should have done on behalf of every American citizen, including the ones not smart enough to know that they can't survive a bankrupt nation, either.
As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said so well, "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." We ran out of other people's money more than $14 trillion ago.
Republicans should up the ante here. Instead of allowing Democrats to accuse them of shutting down the government over a measly $30 billion, they should force Democrats to blame them for eliminating the entire $1.65-trillion deficit proposed in Obama's budget.
Are Republicans scared of being accused of balancing the budget? Most Americans want somebody to balance the budget and stop the insane march into the financial abyss under the unbridled command of the international socialist left now known as the Democratic Party.
Our federal budget has been balanced only once since Andrew Jackson was president. Republicans in Congress balanced one annual budget during Bill Clinton's second term. Democrats under Obama have increased the debt of every American taxpayer by more than 40%, or $4 trillion during Obama's first two years in office.
To put it lightly, Obama is unsustainable. Democrats are unsustainable. And only Republicans have the power to do something about it.
Shut it down, and shut it down now!
Don't start it up again until you have a balanced budget approved and signed by the president, who makes a drunken sailor look like a penny-pincher.
At this late date, the people of this nation are on an austerity program no matter what happens in D.C. But unless they force Republicans to put the feds on an austerity program now, the people will be all alone in their austerity, and the feds will drive this nation into a financial disaster that the nation cannot survive.
It may be too late for fiscal sanity already, but here's where we are. We can't change the past, and our only hope of altering the future is by acting today.
The decision is easy. If we refuse to face the music today, there will soon be no decision to make.
A federal shutdown does not mean that the federal government will actually shut down. That would be nice, but it won't actually happen.
Instead, Democrats will aim the shutdown where their voters will feel it the most. They will keep business as usual, except for targeting their voters' benefits in order to motivate those voters into a revolt in the streets, just as they did in Wisconsin over the state budget battle.
Democrats will try to make even a partial shutdown as painful as possible for the voters in this country who are trained government dependents. They are already out telling their voters to hold Republicans responsible for the big "shutdown," which in reality will impact only government dependents.
Since social spending now exceeds 60% of the entire federal budget, there is no way to rein in the federal government without reining in social spending.
Yes, it will be painful -- but not as painful as driving the nation and every state into bankruptcy and then cutting off all aid to those truly in need.
Republicans simply must summon their fortitude and do the work they were elected to do. Cutting Obama's spending spree by a lousy $30 billion is merely symbolic, an effort to demonstrate to their voters that they did something, even though it amounts to nothing.
The cuts need to be fifty-five times that number: $1.65 trillion. Even then, the interest alone on past spending will still add to the current debt level. But at least we will have stopped the bleeding and set a new course for fiscal sanity.
If the voters throw Republicans out for doing that in 2012, then the voters deserve national bankruptcy.
Go ahead -- shut it down, and don't open for business again without a total fiscal restructuring that demonstrates a willingness in government to be much better stewards of the people's resources.
Go ahead -- shut it down now! It's the only hope for freedom and liberty to survive!
