Political Theater: It Turns Out That The Republicans And The Democrats Were Both Lying To Us And That The Real Budget Cut Number Is Far Less Than $38.5 Billion



The Economic Collapse
April 13, 2011

Guess what? The Democrats and the Republicans are both lying to us again. So what else is new? The truth is that the great “budget crisis” which supposedly took us to the verge of a government shutdown was just a whole bunch of political theater. Even the Associated Press is declaring that our politicians used“accounting sleight of hand”to reach the $38.5 billion budget cut figure. Not that $38.5 billion was an impressive number to begin with. $38.5 billion would just be one percent of the federal budget. But once you strip away the accounting charades, the real budget cut number is somewhere around 14 trillion dollars. It turns out that the “budget cuts” include money left unspent from previous years, earmarks that were going nowhere, unused census money and programs that Obama was already planning to cut. The more you examine the “budget deal”, the more it becomes obvious that the Republicans and the Democrats had no intention of doing anything serious about our debt problems. The U.S. government is still going to run a record-setting budget deficit in 2011 and both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame.

So should we be surprised that our politicians have been lying to us again?

Of course not.

But if something is not done about our soaring debt it is absolutely going to crash our financial system.

According to the IMF, the U.S. government will have to borrow an amount of money equivalent to 29 percent of GDP this year alone in order to finance its budget deficit and its maturing debt.

That is what you call a crisis.

But neither political party seems the least bit serious about the national debt.

The Republicans are proposing even more tax cuts without saying how they are going to pay for them, and they even tucked an increase in military spending into the “budget cut” deal.

The Democrats don’t seem to want to cut much of anything. In fact, most Democrats seem to believe that government debt is not much of a crisis at all.

Our politicians love to talk about “cutting the budget”, but nothing ever gets done. Both parties have been promising us “fiscal responsibility” for decades but both parties have never delivered.

Sadly, the American people have not held our politicians responsible for this.

This latest episode just reveals how much of a joke Washington D.C. has become. In the 8 days leading up to the “historic” $38.5 billion budget deal, the U.S. national debt increased by $54.1 billion dollars.

Our politicians are standing by and doing nothing while the financial future of this nation is being destroyed right in front of our eyes. It is now being projected that by the year 2021, interest payments on the national debt will amount to $1.1 trillion dollars a year.

Fortunately, some bloggers out there are starting to wake up to just how pathetic this latest “budget deal” really was.

For instance, Tim Fernholz of the National Journal recently posted the following….

For example, the final cuts in the deal are advertised as $38.5 billion less than was appropriated in 2010, but after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds, and reductions in mandatory spending programs, discretionary spending will be reduced only by $14.7 billion.

In fact, some conservative bloggers are becoming absolutely furious with the duplicity of the Republican party. In a recent article on Business Insider, John Ellis really let John Boehner have it….

It turns out that the budget agreement that all parties were hailing this past weekend as a “great achievement” is in facta joke. Any Republican who was elected with even a sliver of Tea Party support is now duty-bound to vote against it on Friday. Every 2012 Republican presidential hopeful is now duty-bound to demand that it be voted down.

But Boehner is already saying that it is time to “move on” and that he is really going to “get tough” during the next battle. Boehner is claiming that the “war” over the debt ceiling is going to be about “trillions” instead of “billions”.

The American people are certainly in the mood for something to be done about our debt crisis. According to a new NBC/WSJ poll, the vast majority of Republicans and the vast majority of independents do not want the debt ceiling raised. Even Democrats are roughly split on the issue.

John Boehner is promising that the Republicans will not agree to raise the debt ceiling without “serious steps in the right direction”.

So what pathetically low number will cause John Boehner to cave in this time?

Obama is already taking a strong stand on the debt ceiling. He is demanding that the Republicans send him a “clean bill” and is warning that they must not “play politics” with U.S. government finances.

On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney stated that “the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling would be Armageddon-like in terms of the economy.”

You know what? To a certain degree Carney is right. If the U.S. government hits the debt ceiling the financial markets will likely go haywire. That would cause the big boys up on Wall Street to start putting tremendous pressure on Boehner. There is no way that Boehner would watch chaos unfold on Wall Street and not end up flinching.

Not that Boehner was ever serious about cutting the federal deficit. He was not serious about it during the Bush years and he is not serious about it now.

This is all just a whole lot of political theater.

Meanwhile, most Americans are not even paying attention to all of the financial fraud being committed by the “fourth branch of government”.

Of course the Federal Reserve is not actually part of the federal government at all. But they do get to spend trillions and lend trillions without ever having to get the approval of Congress, the president or the American people.

For example, most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has been handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in nearly risk-free loans to their friends and even to the wives of their friends.

Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve is above the law and is not accountable to anyone. In fact, we can’t even get our politicians to authorize a comprehensive audit of their books.

The truth is that our system is soaked in so much fraud that there is no way that it will ever recover.

We have turned our backs on the principles of our founding fathers and so now we pay the price.

The U.S. national debt is now over 14 times larger than it was 30 years ago and it is currently rising by well over 4 billion dollars every single day. This debt will destroy our financial system. We are stealing the future from our children and our grandchildren.

It is so sad to see what is happening to America.

Well I say again, do not vote for anyone who has a D or an R in front of their names. I would make an exception only if the individual had a record of voting against his/her party in favor of The Constitution. (too bad no Paul's run for office in N.Y.) Unfortunatly what if the whole country did this...

Five things that will happen to you when America goes bankrupt. And none of them are good.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Broken horn time: we are wasting our time trying to find national solutions when we don't have the clout or the numbers to get what we want. The only way is to do what every other group in America has done; built a political base from the grass roots. This lesson will only sink in after they round up anyone even remotely politically active against the beast. We've wasted a lot of time, effort, energy and money supporting a few token, symbolic national candidates.

We have the numbers. Everywhere you look, we are winning. The political class simply choose to pretend we're not there. In the short term, that strategy works; in the long term, they're sealing their own fate.

You can see the signs everywhere. The TEA party enjoyed a huge win in November, and even earlier when--inconceivably--a Republican won a senate seat in Massachusetts. And just recently, union organizers in Wisconsin couldn't even muster a win in an obscure judicial election.

The budget deal, once the details became known, incited anger among everyone I know. So did the President's words on the budget last night (I wouldn't even call it a speech). And Atlas Shrugged opens in more than 300 theaters tomorrow.

In short, the tide has turned. We will win. My only fear is that we will win when it is already too late. And it may well be too late already.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Airforce...

With all due respect, the TEA Party has been subverted at the national level and all good people who signed up are being led around in circles. Happens every time. I should know I was at Tea Party Patriots trying to interest people in a better strategy than a few dozen national candidates.

And those candidates-where are the coat tails? Where are the state and more importantly LOCAL campaigns? The dem/rep machine doesn't neglect the local campaigns, they know the value of giving JUST ENOUGH to the locals to make them feel that they're 'participating'.

6 in 10 Americans want spending cuts. Great. Do those 6 in 10 Americans have a clue about what else is needed? Do they have a clue that most of the tyranny in this country is at the LOCAL level?

This is the same thing I've been telling folks since 2005. You cannot take the federal government peaceably unless you have a grass roots movement that can 1. sustain itself and 2. be decentralized enough to resist being infiltrated and subverted like the TEA party yet have the overall unity of purpose.

If there's anything I've learned about the Patriot Movement its that we love to fight among ourselves. The enemy is like punching a blob that will smother you-you won't do anything to it but get its attention. Now someone obstensively on the same page but you dislike them? It's fucking on buddy!

The only thing I've seen work at the national level are... get ready for this... during the last immigration blowout when Congress was about to grant millions of illegals amnesty once more and all the death threats poured in. Even megacunt Nancy Pelosi was shaking in her thousand dollar heels at her podium about all the calls.

Didn't last. Can't last.

We need to wise up, figure out a long game, stop fighting and being pissed at each other, or letting COINTELPRO divide us, and start harnessing that anger, educate those awakened but still naive Americans about the REAL DEAL and go from there.

That means following the example of the GIs of Athens TN, 1946... not necessarily the shooting part but the part about organizing recall elections and sweeping the rats out of public office so we can have prosperity, low taxes, repatriate the CAFR investments back into the community, fire all the dirty cops. Then repeat in the next community.

The enemy FEARS the recall campaigns! They really do and are trying to erect barriers toward stopping them, because they WORK.

Atlas Shrugged. Read part of it. Didn't care for it but that's me. All the gulches trying to stay away from the beast-won't succeed. We've been trying to detach and disengage from the enemy and as a stand alone strategy it is an utter failure.

And libertarians have left a bad taste in my mouth; you can't talk to them, and if you propose anything like I do you get labeled a 'racist' and banned. Happened to me at the 'free state project'.

Symbolic acts and men on white horses have been our downfall.

Yeah, I think it's too late too. THAT I'll agree with you on.

You don't get any argument from me. The politicians are trying to marginalize the people. Nothing new about that. That's what the political class does.

Another good question. We had candidates in city council races here in Tulsa, and a darn good candidate for governor of Oklahoma, as well. But it takes money to overcome name recognition, and they didn't have it. Brogdon gave it a good shot for the Republican gubernatorial primary, but Mary Fallin was a former congresswoman. That kind of advantage is hard to beat.

At least Governor Fallin is listening to us. It could be worse.

You don't think this is going to be easy, do you? Look how long it took for the American Revolution to finally get off the ground. We're still years away from victory, but we're making headway.

A few years ago, finding someone actually brave enough to criticize the War on Drugs (and who wasn't named Ron Paul) was pretty danged hard to do. And speaking of the Pauls--both of them--people are listening to them. Who would have thought that would be possible even five years ago?



We're going to have to stop agreeing with each other. People are going to start wondering about us.

I'm not sure how the TEA party and Sarah Palin(!) became synonymous. And I don't like it. But that will straighten itself out over time. Either Sarah Palin will go away, or something else will replace the TEA party.



You noticed that too, eh? Libertarians have the same problem. And don't even talk about the Constitution Party. But that's really nothing new. The Founding Fathers had more than their share of disagreements, too.

Quote

We need to wise up, figure out a long game, stop fighting and being pissed at each other, or letting COINTELPRO divide us, and start harnessing that anger, educate those awakened but still naive Americans about the REAL DEAL and go from there.

That's the challenge. And it won't be easy.

Radley Balko has a theory that no one "becomes" a libertarian. Libertarianism happens to people. They undergo one too many searches at an airport, or a cop stops them one time too many, or they're finally shocked at what their children are being taught in the government school, or some dumb bureaucrat insults them on a bad day, or...

You get the picture. It's not a convincing argument that finally sways most people, although those are important. It's what the tyrants finally do to them.

And the tyrants are doing their best to piss off the people. Why else would Donald Trump, of all people, be scoring so high in the polls?

In 1775, maybe ten percent of the colonists favored independence. It was enough. And we have way more than that now. We will win, but it won't be easy.

Onward and upward,
airforce