If you can’t sell us the future, you’re doing it wrong. We all want to get there in one piece.
Right now, a horde of Republican presidential candidates and a small cohort of Democrats vie to present themselves as visionaries, leaders.
Yet, what they all have in common is that they ignore the most serious issue facing us. Bigger than borders and terror and ISIS and gay marriage and all that, is the financial stability of the United States. Our future is in peril because of the continual Washington stalemate of never-ending deficit spending and continual debt growth — total debt being around $100 trillion.
The reason for this enormity? Politicians like to promise things, lots of things, very expensive things like wars and entitlements, to win our votes. But these same promiscuous over-promisers have more than a little difficulty agreeing on the taxes that would pay for all those “things.”
Why the difficulty? Because Americans already pay plenty in taxes and very few of us non-Omaha-based non-billionaires care to fork over even more of our hard-earned pay to a wasteful leviathan.
Any respectable vision of the future must acknowledge the current predicament, and provide a way out — before it’s too late, like it may very well already be . . . for Greece.
Wanting something for nothing isn’t Greek to any of us, unfortunately. That’s why we need leaders with the honesty and courage to present a vision more real than government providing ever more goodies on credit ad infinitum.
Credit just doesn’t add up, infinitely. The more you rack up debt, the more finite your future.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Failing in the Future Biz”
What a great article! You said it all succinctly. This “simple math” should be common sense. I believe this column should go to every 2016 Presidential Candidate.
Just yesterday the White House seemed happy to announce our deficit was only $455 billion. Our president “reduced” it to that much. I don’t think any of my banks would retain my accounts if I were even $455.00 in arrears. And agreed, Paul, I rather give whatever “overage” I have to Charity than the leviathan of government.
As a point of perspective, all the money in all the economies of all the countries the world amount to a little over $67 trillion.
Nor rocket science to figure out that what the US government has committed to pay ain’t getting paid. Only a question of how long before the music stops and along the way, who gets screwed first? Because someone will get selected to be first in order to prolong the ride. And the music WILL stop.
Then we will experience all of the pleasure of every other collapsed fiat currency, where people whose assets are on paper suddenly find that the paper has value only as fuel.
Good article but I have to quibble with you on one point. ALL Americans do not pay plenty of taxes – at least not federal taxes. Many Americans not only don’t pay any taxes on their income but they actually get money from the federal government in the forms of Earned Income Credit and Child Tax Credit.
You know what they say…a hundred trillion here…a hundred trillion there…the next thing you know we’re talking real money.