Default, dead ahead!

Anybody who thinks that there is money put away for Social Security and Medicare, had better stop and think. If there is... then why isn't it going to be used to cover the looming default?

The answer is that there is nothing put aside for these social programs - the money for that comes directly from taxes and false-dollar production.

Clearly, the only money available is the government employee retirement fund, and it's going to run out real soon. Wake up and smell the coffee, if you believed there was some magical lockbox somewhere with all that entitlement money in it. It doesn't exist! The money was spent all along to buy your votes, and you just smiled happily. But now comes the dawn.

The USA has been running a growing deficit, with some periods of faster debt growth, and some periods of slower debt growth, for about fifty years. This deficit grew rapidly since the early Reagan years. Reagan got away with it, because things were not so bad in his day. But to worship Reagan as some sort of god... is just plain ignorant. Reagan had some good ideas, but the USA was going non-productive, and he did nothing about that - except approve Amnesty I for cheap labor. There was a very brief period of positive cash flow near the end of the Clinton years, partly due to some Republican efforts, but mostly due to taxes on the internet bubble.

But the internet bubble ended, and the real-estate bubble began, Republicans turned to war, and Democrats turned with them, and... well, we see where that got us. The real estate bubble burst, and as the truth sank in, the collapse began, and the spending is more and more frantic since the middle of the last Bush II year (2008). And the basic problem continues to lie unaddressed - the USA is less productive than ever, and now on top of that, America is losing the skills it once had, while our former servants in Chinese factories have honed the skills that we lack.  Oh, and we got into yet another war.

But even now, default is not necessary. What is happening is that our left and right wings won't budge, and the extremists are the equivalent of suicide bombers. We need to pay our bills that are coming, and the issue of excess spending needs to be addressed in the budget hearings, but the madmen are talking like that CB trucker record from the 70s, saying they aint-a-gonna-PAY-no-bills. So they are gonna crash the country and blow our interest rates sky-high, that's their brilliant financial answer, when our debt is the worst it has ever been, and meanwhile they just keep adding expenses to the budget that causes it.

Our economy is full of promises we can't keep, and expenses we can't pay. These need to be honestly removed from our budget, like adults would do. But instead, our populace behaves like out of control children, and our politicians take full advantage to get themselves re-elected and rich. There are exceptions - but they are so rare, that they only prove the rule. In our anger, we elected economic suicide bombers to play along with the usual crooks that we elect year after year, and now... well, they are playing with matches while the gasoline leak is running straight at them. We are weeks from a disaster the likes of which we have never seen, and our nation's leaders think it's politics as usual.

If the worst should happen, I doubt that our national leaders will change much, either. They will stand like cartoon characters, filthy from some huge explosion, pointing fingers of blame at each other - and they will mostly be right, for what it is worth.