Friday, March 26, 2010

America's financial future in the balance

Originally introduced in the House of Representatives by Charles Rangel (D-NY) last September as the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 {H.R. 3590}, the Senate passed what became known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Christmas Eve by a 60-39 vote.  After agreeing on the "motion to concur Senate amendments," the House passed the bill on March 21 by a 219-212 vote (which included 34 Democrats siding with the Republican minority).  Two days later, President Barack Obama signed the bill, officially making the Left's brand of health care reform Public Law 111-148.

Here's the issue.

Despite 200 Republican amendments in the 2,000-page bill, along with assurances from Democrats that taxpayers will save $1.3 trillion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the resulting "gross debt" will reach 100.6% of the our national GDP by 2012, a 30% rise from just two years ago.  And by 2014, the total national debt could top $18 trillion.

Additionally, former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin wondered recently in an op-ed for The New York Times how entitlement legislation that is expected to cost $950 billion over the next 10 years could lower deficits by $138 billion.  The answer, he says, is that "...the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed.  So fantasy in, fantasy out."

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer echoed Holtz-Eakin's sentiment, adding that a national sales tax is the only way to generate the revenue needed to sustain this latest government takeover.  He concluded that "Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks... is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement."

How Democrats will fare in the November elections as a result of this bill remains debatable.  But it seems that Obama, who evidently believes in the government's responsibility to impose "social justice," and whose approval rating dropped faster than any President before him, needed this victory for his redistribution-based agenda.  And that, all by itself, could define his legacy.

Andrew Jackson was the last President to pay off the national debt, doing so 175 years ago in 1835.  Since then, and especially over the past 30+ years, the seemingly deliberate misappropriation of taxpayer money has resulted in an insurmountably astronomical debt, not the least of which centers upon China and Japan, who now own a combined $1.66 trillion (45.1%) of U.S. Treasury Securities.  And this comes on the recent the news that Moody's could drop America's triple-A credit rating for the first time ever.

Though such irresponsibility practically begs for the secession debate, the advances of 21st century warfare all but guarantees the suppression of any such uprising, even if a grouping were to number in the tens of millions.  Only an act of God would assure anything better than a Pyrrhic victory.

There appears to be no happy ending in the long run.  In fact, I think we're officially f--ked.  I hope beyond hope to be wrong.

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