Congressman Paul Ryan, one of the least insane men in Washington, has a ten-year plan.
President Obama, one of the most insane spenders in Washington, has a twelve-year plan.
After hearing the president’s plan, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. sovereign-debt outlook to “negative.” Ah, the fine art of understatement. In 1940, after the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk, presumably they downgraded Britain’s outlook to “spot of bother.”
At the world’s first “Presidential Facebook town hall meeting” on Wednesday, even Obama had a hard time taking his “plan” seriously. Sometimes he referred to it as a twelve-year plan, sometimes ten years, sometimes saving four trillion, sometimes saving two trillion. So will the Obama plan save four trillion over twelve years or two trillion over ten?
Advertisement
For the answer let’s go to next week’s first presidential Twitter town hall meeting:
OMG!!! LOL!!!!!!! ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!
Overly Massive Government!!! Legislating Official Largesse!!!!!!! Requiring Offering Foreign Lenders More American Ownership!!!!!!!!!
The president’s plan is to balance the budget by climbing into his Little Orphan Obammie costume and singing: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun.” We’ve already bet our bottom dollar and it’s looking like total eclipse. But Obammie figures if we can only bet Daddy Warbucks’s bottom dollar, the sun will shine. The “rich” don’t have enough money to plug the gap: As a general principle, whatever the tax rates, the Treasury can never take in more than about 19 percent. Since Obama took office, the government’s spent on average 24.4 percent of GDP. That five-point gap cannot be closed, and it’s the difference between the possibility of a future and the certainty of utter ruin. Hence, outlook “negative.”
By the way, if you were borrowing (as the United States government does) 188 million dollars every hour, would your bank be reassured by a 12-year plan?
That’s 2023. Go back 12 years. That’s 1999. Which, if any, politicians in that year correctly identified the prevailing conditions in the America of 2011? Most of our problems arise from the political class’s blithe assumptions about the future. European welfare systems assumed a mid-20th-century fertility rate to sustain them. They failed to foresee that welfare would become a substitute for family and that Continentals would simply cease breeding. Bismarckian-Rooseveltian pension plans assumed you’d be living off them for the last couple of years of your life. Instead, citizens of developed nations expect to spend the final third of their adult lives enjoying a prolonged taxpayer-funded holiday weekend.
What plans have you made for 2023? The average individual attempts to insure against future uncertainty in a relatively small number of ways: You buy a house because that’s the surest way to preserve and increase wealth. “Safe as houses,” right? But Fannie/Freddie subprime mumbo-jumbo and other government interventions clobbered the housing market. You get an education because that way you’ll always have “something to fall back on.” But massive government-encouraged expansion of “college” led Americans to run up a trillion dollars’ worth of student debt to acquire ever more devalued ersatz sheepskin in worthless pseudo-disciplines. We’re not talking about the wilder shores of the stock market — Internet start-ups and South Sea bubbles and tulip mania — but two of the safest, dullest investments a modestly prudent person might make to protect himself against the vicissitudes of an unknown future. And we profoundly damaged both of them in pursuit of fictions.
Your use of twelve years forward (2023)/twelve years ago (1999) is perfect, an easy way to show how little we know of the future. Remember when Clinton's people were bragging how they'd finally learned how to totally control the movement of the economy? What still makes me shudder is they really believed it!!
Mr Steyn spot on as usual. If CAN happen here, it IS happening here.
Frankly I don't think we can pull out of this. We are well beyond the tipping point where the "Fakers and the Takers" can out vote the "Makers".
Thanks Mark,
This is a very sad but very true account of how the loony bin called the house and senate have given this once great country over the last 40 years!
Mark has had me thinking for some time about what Western countries could look like in the not too distant future. I know people that have no concept that the comfortable world they have known is not a permanent norm with no conceivable alternative except to get even better.
Charleston SC is a city with countless beautiful homes built in the early 19th century. I wonder if the people living genteel lives in them in the 1850's could conceive that soon, and for a hundred years, many of those homes would be tenements housing multiple poor families. Now they are in their grand state again, beautifully restored and lavishly furnished. Could the tenants of as recently as the 1960's imagine the opulence of those homes now?
The the cycle could repeat!
And likely will.
Mark Steyn is one of the most insightful, cogent political observers in the nation. I am constantly amazed by his writings and how he seamlessly blends satire and intelligence into each column.
I used to say I was smarter after reading WFB. I am smarter after reading Steyn.
Mr.Stein is unfortunately, on point. Almost all of our nation's great problems have been or are being caused by our government. this includes the federal reserve bank. The arrogance of power, the ignorance of economics, the lack of an historical perspective and the delusions of intellect know no bounds.
We are squandering our great legacy for naught. Perhaps the second coming of the dark ages is almost upon us.
In my parents' generation as kids (between WWI and WWII), their east-coast urban schools did not include foreign languages very much. Even the high schools did not necessarily offer four years of a language other than English, and if they did, odds are that it would be French or Latin rather than any of the source languages (Italian, German, Polish) from the immigrant sources of my grandparents or earlier. Indeed, during WWII, Italy and Germany were enemy nations. Also, in their era, it was more or less assumed that kids from recently-here families would drop out of school at 16 and go to work. No need for another language, since by then immigration was at a historic low, and all spoke English (usually exclusively).
This was still in effect in my own generation, more or less. By then, it was generally assumed that due to use hegemony, English would be the world's language. Anyone who did not speak English well would be from the back woods. And, but in the US and Canada of that era, I recall meeting persons like myself (college students, young adults) whose native language was Chinese or Hindi, but who would never speak anything other than English in the presence of companions whose language was English. A couple of times, when someone began a comment in another language, they were interrupted by their own kind, and told to use English. It was rude to use the other language publicly.
Times have changed! Even in the 1980s, in the US, I recall many instances where Chinese and East Indians communicated in their own language while on the job, effectively excluding co-workers from the (presumably) work-related conversation. This has become more and more prevalent, not to mention the exclusively Spanish parts of town. In essence, the USA is just a geographical territory. It has lost its culture, is losing its language, and (as Mark noted) its money is vanishing, too.
The only thing it hasn't lost is its hypnotic attachment to guns and military. But it sure is losing any reason why.
The ironic thing about Pelosi's statement is that she is right, elections shouldn't matter so much because we share values. Whereas the political differences between the parties used to be mainly over the role of government in the economy, now the battle has expanded. Over the last 40 years the Democratic party has fallen dramatically away from the economic, cultural and foreign policy center. Even into the 80s there were a significant number of Pro-life Democrats in congress -- Gore and Gephardt were among them. Tip O'Neill would never have supported same-sex marriage. JFK ran to the right of Nixon on foreign policy. Until the left moves closer to the center elections will continue to matter more and more.
One of the things that must always be remembered in these discussions is that, unlike a decade or two ago, the states and municipalities are also in horrible fiscal shape. And please; enough from Ryan and Obama with these multi year plans. What are they going to do between now and November '12? Forget the other nonsense; out-years are fairy tales until it's sorted out then.
Obama's overarching agenda seems to be, diminishing the United States ... as a moral force, as a military force, as an economic force. He's doing quite a good job of it.
The upper echelons of government are like snarling dogs fighting over 5% of the war. The rest of the fighting is in the streets in the drug war. And I don't think that anything will be solved until we find a way to end the erosion by drugs in our society. And no one is talking about it!
Meth-amphetamine production and use is rampant in my poor little town and it is consuming all of our social resources. And it doesn't seem to matter if you are a democrat or a republican if you don't have any teeth and you're tweaking so badly you can't stand up.
you owere making sense for a while, but then you could resist tossing in the snide remark about gun and the military.
Your comment is both unnecessary and innacurate. The same people who have lose sight of the common cultur and common language of America are also the least likely to be hypnotized by guns and the military.
You see, guns and the military still symbolize the self reliance that, at one time, made this nation great.
So, the people who are still "hypnotized" by guns and the military are the same peopel that are still "hypnotized" by notions of self reliance and individual liberty. and oddly enough, they will be best suited to survive the collapse of the dollar.
Let me tell you how will 2023 will look. USA will not be able to issue bonds in dollars anymore. You can devalue yourself out of your debt problems once not twice. Look for the US yen t bill or US swiss frank t bill coming sooner than you think
Thomas Jefferson's Warning To America
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
Follow
