BY CHRISTOPHER G. ADAMO – Somehow, the sun came up on Thanksgiving Day 2011, despite the shocking failure of the “Deficit Reduction Super Committee” to concoct a bipartisan program for long-term debt reduction in the federal budget. All of America, we were told, had pinned its hopes on the prospect of a miraculous agreement among committee members that would maintain all of the profligate nanny state handouts, vaporize the federal deficit, and otherwise burst forth with such promise that the nation’s beleaguered economy could rebound through the sheer power of optimism.
Amazingly however, the debate among committee members broke down right along its historical lines. Democrats refused to cut spending, and Republicans refused to raise taxes. The left determined to continue down its dark path and, for once, Republicans refused to go along with them. This, according to the pundit class, is what passes for moral equivalency. But in truth, absolutely nobody was surprised at the ultimate outcome.
Inside Washington, the die was cast last August 2, when the whole “super committee” scam was initially formulated. From the start, its implementation represented just another transparent ploy to divert attention from the intransigence of Democrats, enabled by the cowardice of Republicans, as both groups postured and tap-danced their way into raising the national debt ceiling by more than two trillion dollars over the next sixteen months.
The end game was never in question. Keep the spending going, while cleverly deflecting blame from the majority votes in both Houses of Congress by which it was facilitated. Now, the expectation is that everyone can wag their fingers at those wicked committee members, but not holding anyone in the House of Representatives or Senate directly responsible. And in their minds, these members of the “ruling class” have succeeded. Yet the electorate is much more informed than it was in the past, and the scam is not going to work this time around.
As the news of the “failed” committee effort is disseminated, and the nation is ceaselessly warned of the dire ramifications this all portends, the outrage that the whole endeavor has represented from its beginning, is once again being placed front and center for all of America to ponder. Some grim realities need to be highlighted.
First, the entire premise of a “1.2 trillion dollar” cut has always been a sham. This sum of money would ostensibly be “saved” over a ten year period during which time, even at today’s spending rates, the federal government would squander another 40 trillion dollars, give or take a few trillion. Yet the duplicity gets much worse. Current and historical spending patterns are on track to bloat the budget significantly beyond that amount. So even if any feigned deference to the paltry “cut” directives were upheld, future budgets need only claim that they had originally been projected for higher amounts, then to be “reduced” according to the required committee “cuts,” and all is right with the world. Problem solved.
In short, no real effort at actually cutting spending was ever intended, and if the current crop of Beltway insiders (regardless of party affiliation) maintains its hold on power, none will ever be made. The cynics win this one, while Heartland America continues to pay the price.
It hardly takes a Nostradamus to foretell the ultimate result of such criminally injudicious actions. As ample evidence, the grave consequences of flagrant institutionalized recklessness are continuing to unfold across the Atlantic. Daily, the sums of money being demanded by debtor nations increase at an unfathomable rate. And daily, the prognosis for any financial restoration of the region becomes more bleak.
Europe is in an economic free fall. Yet major segments of its atrociously swelled underclass are either unwilling to relinquish their place at the public trough, or unable to comprehend that the situation is simply unsustainable. So, in response to the lack of available funds in one nation, calls go out to other nations to foot the bill. Ultimately however, collapse is becoming ever more inescapable since every major initiative focuses only on bandaging the latest fiduciary hemorrhage while preserving the system that created the problem.
Among those nations that are progressively more obligated to provide sustenance to the dependent class, the only question is how much they can afford to continue dispensing, with no possibility of compensation, before they eventually drive their own economies into default. Increasingly, speculation is not about if, but when the European Union scheme will implode under the massive burden of subsidized sloth on an international scale.
Euro zone ministers are looking to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a possible means of acquiring sufficient funds for a brief bailout, and Italy is selling its government bonds with the promise of nearly eight percent return. Yet even if the IMF doles out more cash and a sufficient number of investors are gullible enough to buy into Italian debt with a return promise approaching that of junk bonds, the underlying circumstances which led Europe to this dire precipice are all still in place. The utterly flawed philosophies of socialism remain uncorrected. Thus, the dreadful conclusion of the current chaos remains unchanged.
The dazzling political “sleight of hand” that left the fate of America’s economic future in the hands of a twelve member “bipartisan” Super Committee is no more capable of eschewing that same financial day of reckoning in America. And this gloomy prospect remains fixed in the nation’s future, despite the committee’s vigorous efforts to shift blame away from the Congressional bodies whose total lack of principle and ethics spawned it in the first place.
America, Europe, and indeed the entire world have moved dangerously beyond that point in which mere adjustments and fine-tuning will initiate a magical fix that might allow the statist monstrosities to remain intact. Restoration of order and prosperity will come only by a wholesale rejection of the mindset that sanctions the illicit confiscation of one citizen’s duly earned wages by the state, to then be redistributed to another who produced no worthwhile commodity or service by which to earn it.