We Need Some Mr. Smiths in Washington

Rumors started this morning about how things are going on the budget debates. (Please note that when you can only get info by leaked rumor, that does not indicate the most transparent administration in history.) I don’t know what is really happening in Washington. What I fear is that those who are in Washington have a skewed view of what America thinks. And America would think even clearer if liberal Washington newsspeakers were not their main sources of information. 

Let’s just reiterate a few facts: $14.3 Trillion is a ghastly amount. (If you want some perspective on how big, read my July 11th post here.) It doesn’t need to be higher. A spending cap means (self-evidently) you can’t spend above this amount. It’s like a credit limit on a credit card. If you hit the limit, your purchase is denied. That might be really inconvenient if you’re using it to pay tuition on the day it’s due, or possibly to pay the doctor who just delivered your baby. But it didn’t likely get to the limit with that one urgent purchase; it got there by mounting discretionary purchases: that handbag that went with the shoes, the lunch that impressed your friends, that little weekend trip to the coast, a last-minute anniversary gift to prevent the discovery that you had temporarily forgotten, etc.  

What is the solution to the credit card company’s refusal to increase your limit? Spend less. This will require prioritizing. You will pay for food (budget food now, not gourmet), shelter, and essentials such as transportation and current debt payments. But no vacations, no extras. No new clothes, since you already can get by from day to day. Entertainment might have to be a walk in the park or re-watching a video you already own. You know how it’s done; we all do. If we still have some income, we know this isn’t pleasant, but it’s doable, and probably temporary. After we get our budget more aligned with our income, we can save up for a few special purchases. Life will go on. 

Translate that to the current national situation. Is there still income? Yes, all the tax revenue being generated by current tax laws. Is it still possible to pay for the essentials of the role of government; i.e., protection, judiciary, and not much else? Sure. We might even find that, if we’ve been inefficient in any of these areas, we could even save here. But there is indeed, even in these hard times, enough to cover the basic expenses. 

What we don’t have is enough to hire ever more government bureaucrats, non-fireable, at higher pay than productive private sector workers, just so government can give away more money to non-producers, in the form of entitlements. We could easily go through our recent expenses and line out a few items: PBS, for example; money for art; grants to any scientific exploration not directly related to military protection of the nation—anything non enumerated in the Constitution. That’s a long list of shoe-and-handbag purchases that can be curtailed. It’s a matter of priorities, and simply following the Constitution is a very good guide to what expenses to keep and what to spend. 

And, since Medicaid and Social Security are clearly not in the Constitution, but are promises we are obligated to keep to people who no longer have the opportunity to find alternatives, we must as a priority keep those current promises while reforming the system so that there will be alternatives for those who move into the need at a later decade. No one—not a single conservative that I am aware of—thinks that reneging on promises to the current elderly and indigent should be a part of the current debate. 

But President Obama, while insisting none of his favorite extra-constitutional giveaways could possibly be reduced at all, suddenly threatens the loss of medical care to fixed-income elderly, as well as already earned salary payments for working military. What he’s saying is, we will prioritize in a way that is most hurtful—and we will blame those most likely to have protected these very expenses—because we want to manipulate them into giving in to our spending. 

I am praying for those we have elected to stand firm. More than once this week I have thought of the Jimmy Stewart movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. While he is standing strong, the lying machine is at work against him, lying about his character, lying about their motives. And he is in an information dead zone, unable to see what is happening among the people, without a way to get information to them or feedback from them, while he endures his lonely filibuster (back when they actually had to filibuster instead of just threatening to). I’m afraid our entrusted leaders will cave, because they are in that ugly dead zone, where they can only hear beltway media talk, and they don’t know we’re out here supporting them when they stand firm. 

There are more media outlets now. It is hard for me to imagine that Obama can get away with what Clinton did in the 1990s. Everyone can know, just by doing a little bit of web searching, that no one but Obama would ever be responsible for starving the elderly. YouTube and Twitter and facebook and other alternative information sources would explode with refutations. We need our leaders to trust that this is not Tiananmen Square, with entrenched dictators squelching the release of all information. We will tell the truth. But they must do their job, no matter how hard it seems. 

In Mr. Smith’s world, the decency of his enemy was what led to the final resolution. I do not count on that with Obama or any of his followers. But there might be someone who, however misguided now, might change sides if he sees truth and justice on one side and manipulation and lying on the side he had thought was the decent side when he started out. We might get a convert, if there are any decent Democrats out there. And if not, then let the worst happen, let the truth get out, and then let the people choose a better administration so we can get to the task of putting America back together after this disaster of a president.

Irreconcilible Differences

There’s this old saying, as worded by Thumper in Bambi, “If you don’t have somethin’ nice to say, don’t say nothin’ at all,” which is maybe why I say less about our current president than I am thinking. Occasionally, though, some things will spill out. 

There was YET ANOTHER speech/press conference this morning. I am rolling my eyes as I write this. Can the man ever stop blathering at us and actually do some work? Or even play more golf (I’m all for him playing golf, as he has done, more than any other president in history, because I think he does less harm to the country out on the links than anywhere near the White House).  

There was a piece by Walter Williams in April 2010 where he said that there are irreconcilable differences between liberals and conservatives in our country, and we should just admit it and accept divorce as the inevitable best option. I trust Williams was making a point about the differences, and the need to get back to the Constitution, and was not really advocating dividing up the country into pieces. But I do understand the sentiment. 

Obama and I have irreconcilable differences. Idealogically, I can’t imagine how I would ever have accepted him as my president. (Actually, I was not unwise enough to vote for someone so harmful to the country I love and so hateful toward its basic Constitutional law—that was imposed on me by large numbers of people who were just plain wrong to vote for him.) I accepted only based on my acceptance of the Constitution; I accepted the result of a legal vote, with the understanding that peaceful change for the better can happen at the next election. So, in a sense I consented—but I did not consent to the certain abuses that are currently ongoing in that relationship. 

As happens in relationships sometimes, when you know it’s over, when you know there is no way to patch things up, that you begin to ignore the big differences and start to be annoyed at petty little things. Let me just say, I feel that way about Obama's voice.

There’s a chapter in the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, where he describes moments where couples in counseling reveal certain things that predict whether the couple will be able to work things out. The nonverbal cues of contempt and disdain tell the future. And it is, without a doubt, contempt and disdain—toward me, toward people who think like me, regular Americans who sustain the Constitution (which he took an oath to uphold but doesn’t), toward hardworking family people who try to take care of themselves and their own—he speaks to us as though to maggots that shouldn’t be allowed to inhabit his world. 

How do I know this? His tone of voice, his mannerisms, his speech patterns—and suspicion on my part. Without the suspicion, I might not notice. Others don’t. Others continue to claim he is a brilliant orator. To me, he is simply inarticulate. I understand what he says better when I read a transcript rather than hear him, because when I hear him, the disdain toward me is so distracting that I cannot listen without anger. But when I read what he says (with the ums and uhs edited out, because, unlike other great orators, these are plentiful in his unscripted speech), I can see spin and twisted lies among what he is saying. I do not see a stupid man; I see a manipulative one. 

This morning he said, regarding raising the debt ceiling, “The America people expect more than that. They expect that we try to solve our problem. We have a chance to stabilize America’s finances for a decade, for 15 years or 20 years, if we are willing to seize the moment.” 

If you did not know this man, you would think he might be Ronald Reagan urging a recalcitrant Democrat House and Senate to do the right thing and stop spending away our futures. But that isn’t even close to what he meant. He means the Republican House should raise taxes, guaranteeing less revenue, while raising the debt ceiling even more astronomically than thus far, so that he is free to buy votes any way he chooses. 

He also said, “What the American people are paying attention to is who seems to be trying to get something done.” Really? I think he “hopes,” because, as he said earlier, “I always have hope; don’t you remember my campaign?”—he hopes the American people are not paying attention, because now that we have a Republican House, they have passed a budget, which the Senate has failed to vote on. In fact, in something like 800 days into office, Obama and cronies have not done the basic task required of them to pass a budget—at all. Obama offered one up a few months ago that not even a single Democrat Senator voted for; it was voted down 97-0. In other words, even his own party saw that it was garbage, not to be taken seriously. 

And how is he responding to the debt ceiling debate? By threatening to renege on obligations to current Social Security and Medicare recipients, and then blaming Republicans for causing that catastrophe to happen. Think this through: if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, we do no automatically default on our loans, any more than not qualifying for a new credit card in our private lives means we will default on credit card debt we already owe. It just means we are limited in taking on additional debt, and we must prioritize what we spend our money on. We might have to make a budget, if we haven't already done so, and then stick to it. 

So, if we are going to fail to pay those current obligations, he must mean we have gone through every single line item of payment in the government’s expenditures and can’t find anything to cut first. Not paying unwed mothers more every time they have a new fatherless baby. Not paying for research into methane produced by cows. Not paying for Nancy Pelosi to fly a private jet to and from California and elsewhere. No, none of that can be cut, according to Obama, so the logical step, in his mind, is to threaten seniors. A few months back he threatened to not pay salaries due to soldiers serving in the military. Because nothing else can be cut? Surely not. But because he “always has hope” that the media will spin things his way and blame those of us he truly hates and sees as his enemy. 

Yes, I am his enemy; he has made that clear. Not because I am the enemy of the office of President of these United States—but because HE is an enemy to that office, and to this Republic he is breaking his oath to uphold and defend. 

So, yes, I want a divorce. ASAP. If impeachment cannot be done (and I can clearly see that that’s not on the horizon), then the election of 2012 will have to do. In the mean time, can I just please be spared from hearing his disdainful, sneering voice aimed at me?

Global Money Supply and Debt

A couple of years ago I clipped a little piece about economics that I hadn’t known before. This was a question in the “Ask Marilyn” column, in the Parade section that comes in the Sunday paper. Here is the question, followed by the answer by Marilyn vos Savant, who writes the Q&A column: 

Q: If all the money in the world were redistributed so that everyone had the same amount, what would it be? 

A: The global money supply is about $60 trillion. (Economists call this figure the M3 value; it includes much more than currency.) Say that we take it all—which means that you and Bill Gates would have nothing in the bank—and then distribute it equally among every individual in the world, about 6.8 billion people. Each man, woman, and child would receive about $9000. So, if your household now has less than $9000 per person, you would gain. If you have more, you would lose. 

The idea that struck me was not “how do we redistribute equally?” but “how much is there?” I just hadn’t thought about total global wealth as a number before. And the surprising thing was how big our debt is in comparison to global wealth. 

M3 is specifically defined as coins, plus current accounts, plus notes, plus deposit accounts transferable by check, plus certificates of deposit, plus all private-sector bank deposits. In other words, it is essentially the amount of money (plus things easily exchanged as money) in circulation, including both domestic and foreign money. Total wealth could be greater, because it would include non-liquid assets (if I’m understanding this correctly), such as a fully owned home or vehicle. 

You’ll notice that the measurement, at least for us in the US, is in dollars. So if the value of the dollar changes (because of inflation), it could appear that M3 has risen when its value has actually gone down. So, economics continues to be challenging for the lay person. I have seen greater M3 numbers recently, closer to around $75 trillion. Because of the fluid, continuous nature of exchange, it may be difficult to get a specific snapshot. 

But the important detail to remember is that there is a finite amount of money worldwide.  

The current budget debate is about the raising of the debt limit above $14.3 trillion. The debt of the US is right now approximately ¼ of all the money in the entire world. And there are people (our president, the Democrats in the House and Senate, and their minions) who believe we just haven’t borrowed enough. So the question is, what portion of the entire amount of money in the world does it take for the government to fulfill its Constitutionally-required duties? At least that’s the question I’m asking. 

Another question is, what portion of US annual income—GDP—is appropriate for US debt? GDP for 2010 was approximately $14.7 trillion. So, if Obama et al. want to raise the debt limit, is their aim to have the US owe absolutely every dollar that all of the workers in the entire country can produce in a year, plus anyone doing business here from around the world, to be applied to our debt? 

And that’s just to keep up now. What if they continue to spend in a way that increases the debt, so that pretty soon we’re not paying just for all that accumulation up till now, but an equivalent amount of what these Washington types say must be spent now and in the future?  

Worldwide, our GDP remains fairly constant around 26% of worldwide GDP. Coincidentally our debt is also very close to that percentage of global money supply. 

Here’s another detail to add: The $14.3 trillion doesn’t include all the debt. There is also state and local debt (another $2-3 trillion), and government pensions (another $3 trillion) future obligations of programs that are not solvent, namely Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (another $106 trillion). A good summary of this can be found in this piece from June 2010). Here’s a scary paragraph: 

The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare—in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in libilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we’ve totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that’s about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.) 

The total actual debt according to Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote that piece? $130 trillion. In other words, about double the total amount of money accumulated by civilization in the entire world. This isn’t a matter of the wealthy not giving their fair share; this is a matter of government enslaving all the workers of the world for its own ends. 

Any compromise in debt ceiling talks has to be about how much to cut and how fast—with commitments to cut more and more into the foreseeable future. There can be no talk of increasing debt or tax obligations on an overburdened people. End of subject.