Robbing Peter to Pay Paul – Still

This is so darned simple. It amazes me that the media and politicians can continually make it sound so complex. We’ve dug ourselves into this debt hole over the past 30 years as a result of irresponsibility, demonstrated in 2 ways:

1. First, politicians lower taxes without cutting spending. This is really simple math, and no amount of voodoo economics will make this a different equation than it is.
2. Second, we as voters must bear responsibility for electing the politicians who continually tell us the happy stories about how we can just keep charging things on the credit card without taking accountability for what we’re spending.

It’s no more complex than that. While I might blame the neoliberals for starting us down this path, at some point, we as voters must take accountability for our decision in election after election to vote for the guy who says “cut taxes”, rather than the guy who says “be accountable”. Since politicians learned back in the 80’s that we wouldn’t pay attention to the debt as it ballooned out of control, they just kept playing the game.

The most vicious, underhanded, and filthy of the tricks they played with our money was the theft of money from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, in order to make the deficit appear smaller than it really was.

When the taxpayers agree to give money to the government for a specific purpose, one responsibility lawmakers have is to make sure the money goes to the purpose the taxpayers agreed. The taxpayer is entrusting money to the lawmakers, with the understanding that the lawmakers won’t skim the money to some end they decide they’d rather fund.

That’s really simple, isn’t it? Somebody argue with me if I’m wrong about this. In this scenario, wouldn’t you consider it theft or embezzlement or at the very least fraud if a lawmaker took money you gave him for one purpose, and just decided to use it for something else?

Back in the 80’s when this started to get out of control, I remember complaining about it to my friends, most of whom claimed to be politically conservative. How, I asked, can a conservative approve of this sort of theft, not to mention that even with the theft, we’re not balancing the budget? “It’s not theft”, they’d reply, “because it’s really just borrowing. The government is simply borrowing money from Social Security in order to temporarily fund other programs and tax cuts – when Social Security needs the money back, the government will give it to them.”

Right. And pigs fly.

So here we are, approaching the place where Social Security will need that money back that Congress has been “borrowing” for the past 30 years. In fact, we recently put ourselves on the express train to that spot, by reducing the amount that we, as taxpayers, pay into Social Security with each paycheck.

Now the moment of truth is fast arriving. If I was right, and this was theft and fraud, then the response of our elected officials will be to tell us that Social Security is rapidly running out of money, and we’re going to need to reduce benefits. If I was wrong, and this is just borrowing, then the response of our elected officials will be to explain to us now how they intend to raise the money to pay back the trillions they’ve “borrowed” from Social Security over the last 30 years.

It’s really that simple. And the answer is……

Listen to President Obama last night in his State of the Union address. No talk of paying that debt back – just talk of how we reduce benefits.

Listen to the news yourself, and see what you hear other elected officials saying. Is anyone talking about the money we need to raise to pay back the loan we owe to Social Security and Medicare? That debt, by the way, is $4.6 Trillion dollars. How on earth will we raise an additional $4.6 trillion, when we can’t even come close to balancing our current budget?

The answer is clear. Our lawmakers have no intention of paying the debts that they’ve incurred. Instead, they’ll simply run away from their responsibility. That makes what’s been happening for the past 30 years theft and embezzlement – plain and simple. I wish I’d been wrong on this one, but current politics is proving me all too right…

The older I get, the more tired I become with these losers we keep sending to Washington – the ones who’re too cowardly to own up to their responsibility to balance the budget they’re put in charge of. They can’t stand up to the taxpayer and tell the taxpayer what he really owes, so like the cowards they are, they keep telling the taxpayer they’ll reduce taxes, knowing all the while that this is irresponsible and cowardly.

They’ll keep taking the money from our elderly, to fund their pet pork projects. When will we get tired enough of this to get rid of these losers?