Shut Down - Please!

Shut Down!  Please!

Here’s the thing: they say the government is on the verge of shutting down.  I’m aware that there are all sorts of nuances to this, but at most what will happen is that there will be a delay in a few payments, but beyond that, this is a tempest in a teapot.  Washington will play their asinine games, and the nation will grind forward.

Here’s some important things to remember: we have gone 5 years without the President and the Senate passing a comprehensive budget – which is a violation of the law.

Since May the federal debt has – officially – not increased.  Meanwhile, we have accumulated roughly $200 billion in more debt; how’s that for bookkeeping?

Raising the debt limit is next; the President has stated that ‘raising the debt doesn’t mean that we are going to raise more debt.’  But it does if we follow His Spending plans.

We have nearly doubled our national debt in the last 5 years, and the current spending plan, under the guidance of the President, will continue running up an additional $500 billion in debt every year for the next 10 years – assuming economic forecasts are as favorable as they hope – and they never have been.

Federally mandated unfunded annuities have grown from $130 Trillion (with a T) in 2008 to over $210 Trillion in the last five years.

They say that the first step in any kind of recovery is recognition that there is a problem.  The government, and in particular this President and his minions, do not believe there is a problem.  I suspect that a shutdown will not yield any real change.  But we need to wake up – we aren’t ‘in up to our necks,’ we are in deep water, by analogy we are in water thousands of feet deep and we keep taking on more weight (debt).  We need to recognize that we are headed towards a catastrophe.