By Judd Garrett – May 25, 2023
Imagine if you sent your son off to college with a credit card that was meant to be used only to pay for the essentials and emergencies. And every month that credit card was maxed out, with spending on alcohol, parties, video games, and so forth. After the school year was over, what would you do? Would you call the credit card company and ask them to increase the credit limit on the card, so your son can continue his spending spree on non-essential, frivolous items, or would you take a scissors, cut up the credit card, and demand that your son gets a job that summer to pay off the balance of the card?
This is essentially the decision that we have right now when dealing with the debt ceiling. Too often, we have allowed the politicians in Washington to run wild with our credit cards, engaging in frivolous spending over and over and over again, and our only response has been to repeatedly raise the debt ceiling which allows our irresponsible politicians to spend more and more and more and more of our money. Our money. Not theirs. Our money. They spend our money, all the time without a conscience. Even the money that they think is theirs – their salaries – is our money because their salaries are paid with our tax dollars.
For the first time in a long time, we have a Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, willing to take on this out-of-control behavior by leveraging the debt ceiling to get substantive cuts in spending. But without conceding one inch on the budget though, Joe Biden stated, “it’s time for the other side [Republicans] to move from its extreme positions because much of what they’ve proposed is simply, quite frankly, unacceptable.” Joe Biden believes that demanding that we reduce our $1.2 trillion annual deficit is an “extreme position”. That is like the college kid who just maxed out his parents credit cards, screaming at them, “you’re so mean” when the cards are taken away from him.
Speaker McCarthy responded to Joe Biden in a tweet, “President Biden doesn’t think there is a single dollar of savings to be found in the federal government’s budget. He’d rather be the first president in history to default on the debt than to risk upsetting the radical socialists who are calling the shots for Democrats right now.” And that’s why Biden sees fiscal responsibility as “extreme”. He is aligned with the most extreme faction in his party.
Democrat politicians have been trying to scare the American people about the United States government defaulting on its obligations if we don’t raise the debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen called that possibility, “a recipe for economic and financial catastrophe.” Defaulting does not scare me. What scares me is that we have a $31.5 trillion debt. Let me repeat that. We have a $31.5 trillion debt. There is nothing really to understand. The United States government is completely underwater in debt. We were told that when Joe Biden’s administration took over, that the adults were back in charge. Well, it appears that a bunch of spoiled teenagers are running our government. Carrying this level of debt is unsustainable. We will not be able to survive. Our deficit spending has led to many of the problems that we are currently facing.
Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, made it very clear that there is only one cause of inflation when he said, “Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington creates money. And any other attribution to other groups of inflation is wrong; consumers don’t produce it; producers don’t produce it; trade unions don’t produce it; foreign sheiks don’t produce it; oil imports don’t produce it. What produces it, is too much government spending, too much government creation of money and nothing else.” Deficit spending leads the Fed to decide to print billions of dollars out of thin air to pay the debt, and printing that new money devalues the dollar which creates inflation. And that inflation has forced the Fed to increase interest rates, in order to strengthen the dollar, which is driving us closer and closer into a recession.
Biden and the Democrats refuse to admit that spending is the problem, so they refuse to make any cuts. In 2022, we took in a record $4.8 trillion of revenue, and we spent $6.0 trillion which means all we have to do is spend less than $4.8 trillion next fiscal year, and we would not have to raise the debt ceiling. In 2019, Federal government spending was at $4.4 trillion which would give us a $400 billion surplus with today’s revenue. But Joe Biden and the Democrats are acting like cutting government spending back to pre-pandemic levels is draconian. On Friday, President Joe Biden accused Speaker Kevin McCarthy of having “sold away everything” to the “far, far right.” Actually, it is Joe Biden who has sold his soul and our country to the far extreme of his party..
I will say it again. We have $31.5 trillion of debt. We are taking on water big-time. We cannot have any more debt. It is unsustainable. At this point, the government must do what it expects the average citizen to do when they are drowning in debt, prioritize their spending from the most essential to the nonessential, and work their way down, and when they’re out of money, they stop spending. This is not rocket-science. We don’t need to call in Space-X’s top scientists to figure out this problem. The average every day American citizen does this on a monthly basis. But for some reason, our politicians who are supposed to be so smart that they are our leaders, cannot get their heads around this.
They pretend that there is nowhere to cut in the federal budget. When you are running deficit’s this large, you have to decide what is essential and what is non-essential, but they refused to do it. It is interesting though, during Covid, the government had no problem, telling the private sector which jobs were essential and which jobs were not essential, which jobs had to stay active and which ones could be shut down. They didn’t even vote on it; there was not even a congressional hearing to determine the essential and nonessential workers and businesses in our country. They made that decision without debate, and then passed the edict down to the American people who had to abide by it or go to jail. Now the same people who were telling us if we were essential or nonessential, cannot look in the mirror and determine which parts of the government are essential and which parts are not essential. They will claim every job in the most bloated and wasteful entity on the planet is essential which is a lie.
The climate change people always warn us, what kind of world are we leaving for our grandkids? Well what kind of country are we leaving for our grandkids? Right now, we’re leaving at least $31.5 trillion of our debt to our grandkids, and at the rate that our national debt is growing, my grandkids are going to be facing $50-$60 trillion of our debt that they will have to pay for.
But all of this is part of the far-left’s end game for America. Destroy the country so, they can recreate it in their own image. That’s what they do with everything. They are burying our country under unescapable debt which will eventually break our financial systems. Last week, the Biden Administration ended the Title 42 immigration policy, and 700,000 illegal immigrants immediately rushed across our border. Once again, that’s their game plan, destroy our national sovereignty by flooding the country with 5 million illegal immigrants. Make our major cities hell holes filled with violence, drugs and homelessness. Purposely create all these problems to destroy the existing systems and then use that as grounds to usurp authoritarian power over the country. They never let a crisis go to waste in order to procure more power for themselves. And if there is no crisis, they create new crisis after new crisis so they can exploit them as well.
The problem is not that we don’t have enough tax dollars, the problem is the politicians in Washington do not have a will to balance the budget. The solutions are not very hard. Every time the Federal Government passes a budget that carries a deficit, every Congressman’s salary should be cut in half, every Congressional staff should be cut in half, all Congressional pensions should be cut in half, and every bureaucracy in the Federal Government should be forced to terminate 50% of its workforce. That is an easy solution that will never be implemented because the politicians in Washington are incentivized not to balance the budget, because they receive millions of campaign contributions from wealthy donors and then repay them through our massive spending and massive debts. So, all these politicians do not vote for a balanced budget or spending cuts because that would mean that they could not pay back their wealthy donors who were supporting their campaigns and their livelihoods. So, they are all benefiting enormously from all of the deficit spending that is drowning our country. I have said it before and I will say it again, the United States Federal Government is the biggest scam that has ever been perpetrated on a group of people in human history. At some point, we have to tell our elected leaders, enough is enough. It is time to cut the credit cards.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.
