Squaring the Culture

The big news in the blogiverse today is about the national health care debate. I’m not ignoring it, I’m just positing what I consider to be the chief argument against a national health care plan of any type. However, this is not primarily about health care, it’s a warning: the self-immolation countdown on the US economy has been ongoing for several decades, but is reaching the critical moment. We’re probably only a year or three away from total and possibly permanent meltdown. To be talking about adding a $2.5 trillion entitlement for any reason, regardless of how moral and necessary one imagines it to be, is criminally insane. Anyone doing it should have their office removed as a minimum measure, and should serve jail time.

For what it’s worth, I suspect President Obama knows this perfectly well, and if we ever find and produce the evidence that this was his intention all along, justice demands a Mussolini treatment, which I do believe involves meat hooks somehow.

Ralph Benko produced an article worth reading on this subject last week in the Washington Examiner, entitled “Interest increases central to looming debt crisis.” It’s a bit technical, and it assumes you know a few things that you might not, but the key message is that the amount of interest we pay annually on the US national debt is about to fly upward, because the deficit is flying upward and the interest rates are about to fly upward. This has been expected by everybody who knows the first thing about national or international finance, and is entirely predictable; if you want to review what I’ve said about it here on my own blog, here’s a link to the thread of articles.

A brief refresher course: by “mandatory spending,” we’re talking about the portion of the federal budget that is required by established programs, and therefore does not get adjusted by Congressional appropriations bills. “Discretionary spending,” the other portion of the federal budget, is the subject of all those Congressional budget negotiations we read about. Mandatory spending is about 1.5 times larger than discretionary spending as of 2008, and will soon be growing faster, thanks to the galloping increase in the national debt. President Obama’s own figures say we’re currently spending roughly $200 billion in interest on the national debt, and that we’ll be spending around $700 billion by 2019 at current projected deficit levels.

Here’s the kicker: what we currently spend on non-military discretionary spending is less than $700 billion. Which means that the growth of the interest portion of mandatory spending will soon eat about 80% of what we currently spend on the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, and so forth. Anybody confused about why the Secret Service is starved for cash?

It gets worse. How sound do you really think those numbers are? Do the White House figures assume interest rates will remain at near-current levels? They will not; they’re heading for Carter-era levels, and that right soon. Do they assume deficits as published, with the new medical nightmare rolled in? Those deficits will skyrocket, as tax revenues shrink and cost overruns mount, as they always do when the government expands. So we can be certain that the growth in annual interest payments on the national debt will be far larger than $500 billion over the next 10 years, and probably much larger. They could easily eat every single penny of what we currently have available for discretionary spending outside the military, and considerably sooner than 10 years from now. We’ll be spending all discretionary money on financing the national debt; not paying it off, mind you, just paying the interest payments. Fewer than 10 years from now.

Only, you can be sure that the Oligarchs will not be firing their friends. Suek, one of my regular commenters, pointed to this take on the growing federal bureaucracy, which was, in turn, based on this report regarding how the number of 7-figure incomes in the federal bureaucracy has mushroomed under Obama. As the level of debt service grows, the government will declare an emergency and expand taxation massively, or they’ll print money like it’s going out of style. They’re not going to fire their friends.

Philip Jenkins back in February of this year offered us a sobering object lesson showing what can happen to a nation when the government gets taken over by greedy corruptocrats who shift a prosperous, free market onto a government-controlled model where the leaders can reward their friends. He uses the nation of Argentina, which was the 10th wealthiest nation in the world back in 1915, but is today an irretrievable and irrelevant basket case. And hear Jenkins’ assessment of their condition, and by extension, our own, like the voice of the Ghost of Christmas Future:

A corrupted economy can’t be cured without being wiped out and started over.

Translated to our own situation, we’ve come to a place where the system cannot recover from the disaster it has created. Simply winning Congress back from the Democrats is not going to solve this. The problem is structural — meaning, the growth is inevitable given the current structure of the programs that comprise mandatory spending — and Congress has demonstrated its complete inability to address the structural problem. We do not need politicians who will vote against irrational spending bills; we need ones who will radically restructure programs like a financial counselor on amphetamines. We conservatives like to think of the Reagan Revolution, but Reagan only slowed the growth rate of the federal government, he never shrunk it. What we need is far more radical than that — and it will not happen within the current structure of the body politic, regardless of who’s in Congress. We elected representatives to do this work back in 1994, and they got eaten alive by the corrupting influences of Washington, DC. We need to wipe out the system and start over.

Let me repeat that: the only way to avert permanent disaster is political revolution.

And mind you, political revolution is enough disaster on its own. In the wake of true revolution, everybody will be much, much poorer than they were. However, if the revolution is successful, at least part of what remains may have a chance of restoring fiscal and political sanity. We need a new nation based on sound principles of individual liberty, personal virtue, religious fidelity, and fiscal responsibility. The old one does not represent those things anymore.

If allowed to continue on its present course, the Ship of State will steer directly into the center mark of an enormous iceberg labeled “Fiscal Death.” The officers in charge, meanwhile, are fighting duels over the menu, and over who’s going to pay for dinner. The evasive measures that might have a chance of missing the iceberg, require such drastic maneuvers that we have not the luxury of time to persuade the officers to abandon their argument. We have to take over the ship.