For those people that watched the popular Netflix series ‘Suits,’ know it had many interesting episodes over many years.  It featured high-powered legal firms fighting other high-powered legal firms in a large metropolitan city. The general theme, which occurred over and over, centered on pushing the legal envelope in court to win.

The underlying theme, however, was trust.  Partners of the firm were often afraid their partners and associates could not be trusted.  This led to internal discourse creating chaos, dysfunction, and instability of the firm’s very existence.

And so it may be with our country, our leaders, and the average American.  Politicians are known for pushing agendas.  When the results of agendas appear to be 180 degrees from their intent, however, we must question the trustworthiness of this leadership.  It could well undermine our countries’ existence.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the many lies we are asked to believe:

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2023.   Read the one-year report: “Inflation Reduction Act is Driving Historic Climate Action and Investing in America.” The article identifies spending more money in history this past year to fight ‘Climate Change’ than ever before.

Next read “Congress Is on a Christmas Spending Spree” by the CATO Institute.  The article ends, “Annual deficits are in the trillions, and interest rates are at historic highs. Now is not the time to throw gasoline on the Yule log. A Christmas emergency spending bonanza would worsen America’s unsustainable budget trajectory and further undermine trust in the U.S. government as a responsible fiscal steward.”

We are overspending billions on billions.  Is this inflation reduction?  Or a lot of wordsmithing (the author’s wordsmithed word for BS)?  This overspending has prevented our economy from tanking.  How much more debt can we add, however, before the dollar becomes a desperately weak global currency and we become trapped?  Trapped because other nations don’t want to touch (buy) our debt any longer.  Many say we are close to that threshold right now.

College Leadership.  Could you believe the answers given to Congress by presidents of prestigious institutes of higher learning recently?  Their responses were so wishy washy and wordsmithed to death, most people are not sure what they said.  

Should not communication between leadership of higher education and Congress be done with clarity and understanding, not gobbledygook?  Do you not shudder to think what may be taught in our colleges and universities today? How can one we trust higher education and our school leadership when they use innuendos and vague words that don’t mean what they used to mean? 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.   Bloomberg recently reported the Treasury Secretary, said “My expectation is that inflation will continue to come down, adding she anticipated inflation will fall into a range near 2% by the end of 2024.”  What?

The Federal Reserve's aggressive rate-hiking campaign jacked up the cost of credit for borrowers across the economy, including the U.S. government. Higher borrowing costs mean the government pays more interest on its debt. Rising U.S. debt interest payments create a vicious feedback loop: to attract new borrowers, yields on Treasuries have to rise to sweeten the deal, and higher yields aggravate already-high borrowing costs on total debt now pushing $34 trillion ($34,000,000,000,000). If Uncle Sam paid this debt at the rate of $100 dollars every second, it would take the government 10,780 years (or before recorded history) to accomplish the task.  Can you comprehend this number?  How can the average person trust Janet Yellen? 

One could continue this article on why we should not trust Congress, the Fed, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIS, and many others.  There is plenty of wordsmithing going on.

It is said ‘You can fool all people some of the time and some people all of the time, but you can’t fool all people all of the time.’  The current administration, with support by the press, appears to be trying to fool all the people all of the time.  

Dann E. Kroeger, Common Sense Economist

Image: Wikideas 1