August 1, 2010
By Herman Cain
By Herman Cain
“Our economy is on a government-induced lose-lose trajectory of financial destruction between federal spending and tax revenue. It’s a Mathematically Assured Depression (MAD). The only unanswered question is when.”
- Herman Cain, March 9, 2009 commentary
I do not enjoy bad news predictions. But the president, his administration, Congress and the major mainstream broadcast media are focused on everything except the coming financial disaster we face. It’s not that the other issues are not critical. The financial crisis could be catastrophic.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued another warning last week that the growing federal debt is unsustainable! It is a real crisis! As stated in the CBO report, “A growing level of federal debt would increase the probability of a sudden fiscal collapse”.
This did not just start under the Obama Administration, but it has clearly accelerated during this administration. Consider the following statistics:
When President Obama took office in January 2009, the national debt was $9.5 trillion, which is nearly $32,000 for every man, woman and child living in this country. The national debt as of this writing is nearly $14 trillion, which is $45,000 for every man, woman and child living in this country. That’s a historic increase in a historic short period of time!
That debt does not die when we die. Our children and grandchildren will have to pay our foreign creditors back, if we can avoid a total financial collapse.
As the president and Congress continue to spend like crazy, they continue to pay lip service to wanting to get spending under control. Their words do not match their actions.
For example, Senate Democrats tried to pass a $30 billion “drop in the bucket” package to help stimulate lending to small businesses. Over $600 billion of the stimulus bill has not worked, so the Democrats wanted to throw another $30 billion on top of the $846 billion stimulus spending. The majority of Republicans voted against it because it was new spending, when the money could have been taken out of unspent stimulus funding.
Of course, the president blamed the Republicans for being partisan obstructionists.
The anticipated December 2010 report by the Debt Commission appointed by the president will be nothing more than so-called justification to raise taxes even more than they will automatically increase on January 1, 2011 if Congress does absolutely nothing. Whether or not only the “rich” gets hit remains to be seen.
The CBO report and analyses by other organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation, indicate that the administration and Congress are playing “sudden death” with our economy, which has huge national security implications.
The notion that raising taxes will solve the problem is misguided and factually false based on sound historical analysis. And the belief that this economy will not slow down even further with tax increases is equally misguided.
Admittedly, this is not an inspiring or entertaining topic. In fact, it is downright scary. It is even scarier that a large number of voters are equally oblivious and blind to this clear and present financial danger. What happened in Greece and other European countries can happen here.
The big difference is that Uncle Sam does not have a “sugar daddy” to bail us out.
The 2010 congressional elections are sudden death for control of the House of Representatives. If real Republicans take control, there is some real hope of slowing down the destruction of our economy.
This is a serious crisis, and the elected so-called leaders are not listening. I believe the voters are listening. They will remember in November.
