Thursday, August 5, 2010

Appropriate Plans for the Future

So there's an advertisement which is running on some web sites, from defeatthedebt.com. In it, the voice over laments the $3.5 Billion of additional debt the US is accumulating per day, and extols the need to stop digging ourselves deeper into the proverbial financial hole. I'm not sure I agree, though; not because I think our ridiculous recent handout spurts are anything but asinine partisan politics, or I think the deficit is easily solved or anything, but quite the opposite. I think it might be time to stop living in the fantasy world, and start thinking and planning pragmatically.

For example, I don't necessarily think we (the US people) should really start trying to reverse the tide of mounting deficits, and somehow try to save enough money to pay back the entire national debt. I mean, it's a noble goal, and the current situation is certainly worthwhile to guard against in future governmental frameworks, but realistically there's just no conceivable outcome to the current deficit spiral other than a default, in some form. With the enormity of the hole our politicians have already created, the reckless and astounding lack of any fiscal responsibility in the current government, and the crushing weight of pyramid schemes created and expanded by previous equally-irresponsible leaders looming, it might be time to think pragmatically about the national debt. That is, it might be time to abandon the "how do we fix it" question, and move on to the "how do we not be crushed when it inevitably collapses" question.

As this opinion piece by Peggy Noonan aptly points out, Americans are coming to the realization that the good times are over. Our politicians have done such a monumentally horrible job of managing the country that the era of ever-increasing prosperity in the US is likely over (which, to be fair, is also the fault of the monumentally idiotic voters who put them in office; eg: see Nancy Pelosi). This, coupled with the insurmountable debt, virtually ensures that the US will need to collapse (at least fiscally speaking) before it can be rebuilt; and like the financial debacle, where banks had trillions in bad assets and loans which needed to be revalued and cleaned out before the system can recover, the US will need to purge both its debt and pyramid scheme type obligations before it has a chance to return to increasing prosperity. The only question is whether the people suffer for a long time fighting uphill while in denial, or if we can openly admit the inevitable, choose the quick path which leads to the least suffering for the American people, and get to work on changing the system to prevent such egregious abuses of public trust in the future.

It's no longer enough to ask the politicians to stop making the problem worse. We need to start planning for the inevitable national default, start creating means for honest hard-working Americans to minimize the damage to themselves and their livelihoods, and start thinking about how to make sure these type of politician scum (the current group and groups past) can never again do such monumental, irrecoverable harm to the United States of America.

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