www.thornwalker.com/ditch/fields_debt.htm
Debt-ceiling
Armageddon!
By HENRY GALLAGHER FIELDS
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Moreover, everything seemed to be moving swimmingly on
the ever-multiplying fighting fronts, as our drone missiles
once in a while hit intended targets in Afghanistan and our
Nobel Peace Price-winning president sent U.S. bombers and
fighter planes into kinetic military action stirring
phrase! over Libya to save a million or so Libyans
from imminent extermination at the hands of the brutal
tyrant
It seemed that the only thing one was being encouraged to
worry about was climate change, née global warming,
which threatened to melt the icecaps, flood all coastal cities
and tropical islands, and cause the extinction of the polar
bear. Now, the climate argument was a rather complicated
thing because sometimes, especially if the temperature here
in Hoosierdom fell to about
The increasing cold, we were told, was explained by the melting ice, changing ocean currents, increased rainfall, and 15 or so other factors that did not have to be known if one simply put one's faith in the opinion of experts, including Dr. Albert Gore, which all respectable people do. (It's Science!)
While I tried to worry as expected I'm a good citizen! it was difficult to do so because the dire consequences wouldn't appear for decades and the current weather seemed about the same as ever, though of course only real dunderheads think one can draw conclusions about the climate from the actual weather, except when it comes to using any conceivable type of weather to prove the global-warming thesis. (Science is hard! We'd better leave it in the hands of the leftists. They're smart!)
Anyhow, as predictions and warnings went, it was the
climate-change crisis that the eagle-eyed lefties really
seemed to be fixated on, perhaps hoping that they'd
eventually be able to add it to their glittering record of
accurate forecasts, such as the Tragedy of Too Much
Affluence, the Population Bomb, Famine 1975, No More
Crude Oil by 2000, and their old version of the Coming
Ice Age.
But alas! I was rudely shaken out of my peaceful slumber by the strident screams of our media mandarins to the effect that Armageddon had suddenly taken up residence just around the corner because of the Central Government's Himalayan debt. Now, I could have sworn we had been told over and over, and for a long time, that there was nothing to worry about when it came to government debt that we just owed the money to ourselves (plus a few of our Chinese chums). And besides, a modern government must engage in extensive spending to cover the ever-inflating needs of the people (they're helpless!), which only the state can satisfy.
However, as I listened more closely I found out that the problem was not one of excessive spending which may float ever upward but is absolutely required, especially in this time of recession with insufficient consumer demand, the liquidity trap, and other obvious failures of the greed-crazed, laissez-faire, free-market, running-dog, dog-eat-dog, sick-as-a-dog, dog-tired capitalism that had dogged us before the advent of Prof. Obama that super-slick cat and the cuddly, purring geniuses around him. No, the problem was not one of spending, but as all economists of any merit understood, one of insufficient taxation.
People were just keeping too much of the money they made especially successful business folks who actually turn profits instead of merely collecting government bailouts. Worst of all, the Republicans, who in the past, despite their anti-government jargon, had been realistic enough to ultimately support any tax and spending measures put before them, were now being so gauche as to actually abide by their promises to the voters, an absurdity never before witnessed in Washington City. And it was all the doing of those Tea Party folks who represent the unwashed yokels of the vast hinterland west of the Hudson and the Potomac. Those wackos of the wilderness harbor irrational resentments against their intellectual superiors and society's poor and helpless, and some actually seek to return America's foreign policy to the antediluvian isolationism that caused Hitler and the Holocaust.
The cantankerous crackpots are so irrational that they
expect Congress to abide by its own debt-ceiling law, little
understanding that such statutory limits on debt, like all
laws, must always be broken or phonied up into humbug for
the good of society, and that no intelligent person has ever
contemplated sticking by them in the past. (Well, yes,
Barack Obama did vote against increasing the debt ceiling
when he was in the U.S. Senate, but he was inexperienced at
the time and still learning his lessons at the knee of Indiana's own Uncle
Dick Lugar.)
Anyway, if responsible statesmen and stateswomen don't do something about those sedition-tending nincompoops from nowheresville ignore them, put them in protective custody, something parts of the U.S. government will be forced to shut down, and modern America as we know it will cease to exist. Such a development would be almost as bad as the death of the last polar bear.
Not to worry, though. Amid all the obligatory hand-wringing, crying, and gnashing of teeth, knowledgeable insiders maintain that as the end date approaches our solons will develop enough backbone to abandon all promises made to voters, and by some manipulative strategy avert the disaster; and the Central Government will be allowed to spend a few more trillions of dollars until the time comes when that elevated debt ceiling has to be elevated once again. Ω
July 23, 2011
Published in 2011 by WTM Enterprises.
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