The Impending Debt Star

The Impending Debt Star

Thomas Carlyle characterized economics as “the dismal science” in the eighteenth century. It hasn’t changed much in the twentieth, particularly as it relates to our federal government’s handling of the economy and most particularly as it concerns the current debt crisis.

That “handling” has, in fact, gone beyond dismal and has breached the realm of the hopelessly bleak as a result the ongoing, contentious debate over the so-called “debt ceiling,” that is, to raise it for the umpteenth time and burden our children and grandchildren with even more debt or to stop the fiscal insanity of borrowing even more money from people like the Chinese to pay our bills.

Running our households like government runs our government would eventually bankrupt individuals just as the feds and local politicians are bankrupting the country and any number of states.

Washington, of course, has a unique advantage over places such as New Jersey and Wisconsin in that in D.C. they have an alternative to all that borrowing: They can simply print more dollars when they exhaust the national treasury or when China indicates it holds too much of our insecure notes.

If Joe Blow or Joe the Plumber had access to dollar printing presses, both Joes would be accused of counterfeiting yet politicians get away with it.

The issues most Americans understandably refuse to confront are unpalatable and painful.

After all, this is America, exceptional, invincible, wealthy, and wise. We can’t, we refuse to believe we can go bankrupt! We can’t undergo anything akin to post-World War I Germany when it took a wheelbarrow full of virtually worthless papiermarks to buy a loaf of bread! We refuse to accept that our paper bucks, the value of which is based not on anything with intrinsic value such as gold but on the full faith and credit of the United States of America, will succumb to hyper-inflation!

It simply can’t happen here!

To paraphrase the chief architect of our fiscal plight: Yes, it can.

Daniel J. Flynn in “Five Falsehoods of the Debt Debate” lists only the most recent “falsehoods,” a euphemism for lies, perpetrated by that architect.

They include . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5037)