Justin Raimondo: Why Is America Committing Suicide?
“Only in Washington, D.C., is a “cut” actually an increase!”
- Great article. America is on the road to ruin. Social unrest, violence, riots, poverty, hunger ….. are coming. The country is turning into a 3rd world nation much like Somalia. It will not be pretty. The next 6-12 months will see the collapse of the American society. The Illuminist snakes intend to abuse America, the same way Germany was abused to start World War.
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Why Is America Committing Suicide?
by Justin Raimondo, http://antiwar.com/
The US of A on the road to ruin!
America is committing suicide. That’s the only explanation I have for the course followed by US policymakers in the past decade, a period in which the US budget deficit has skyrocketed beyond all reason. While we have run up deficits before, some of them considerable by the standards of the day, in 2001 – the year we launched our endless “war on terrorism” – the deficit began to enter new territory. Whereas before it had fluctuated, going up, down, and effectively maintaining a steady state of neutral, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks this country went into debt bigtime, with the deficit climbing steadily, doubling in 2007, and nearly doubling again the next fiscal year.
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In the name of fiscal “austerity,” Congress recently authorized yet another raising of the debt ceiling, and everyone sits around waiting for the “draconian” cuts to fall – a “cut,” that is, in the rate at which government spending is projected to grow. Only in Washington, D.C., is a “cut” actually an increase – just not as much of an increase as was anticipated. As Ron Paul pointed out, if Congress had simply frozen spending at 2004 levels, we’d have more of a “cut” than we do now.
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No one is surprised by this Washington doubletalk: that’s the language they speak in the Imperial City, where murdering civilians is “collateral damage” and taxation is “revenue enhancement” instead of good old-fashioned theft. It’s silly season on Capitol Hill: so what else is new? Yet I sense a more sinister pattern in this Kabuki theater known as the debt ceiling drama, the implications of which are darker than I care to contemplate — but then again, that’s my job …
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While governments can only finance their completely non-productive (in reality: counter-productive) activities by incurring debt, it’s rare in human history to find profligacy comparable to our own. One has to go all the way back to ancient Rome, under the heel of its more depraved emperors, to find a precedent. The numbers are not merely astonishing: they are inconceivable. The figure — $14.3 trillion – must forever remain in the world of abstractions, because any attempt by the human brain to concretize it fails. How do our lawmakers imagine we can continue to spend at these levels, living light years beyond our means?
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Their recklessness is epitomized by how the military budget came out in all the deficit dickering. As it stands, real defense cuts only kick in if the “super-Congress” fails to come to an agreement on what cuts to make. Then and only then will the misnamed “defense” department come in for something approximating its fair share of cuts. Put another way: only in the most extreme and politically next-to-impossible case will Congress even consider cutting back on its overseas empire. They’ll yank your grandmother off her dialysis machine before they’ll contemplate getting rid of “foreign aid.”
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We ordinary folk live in a completely different world than the movers and shakers of the Imperial City: no one outside the Beltway bubble can really understand the mental processes that allow for such a massive evasion of reality, a kind of collective madness that infects the ruling elite in this country, regardless of party. They talk down to the hoi polloi, and use a different language when they converse among themselves, but occasionally the truth comes out. In 2004, Ron Suskind wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine which included this quote from an unnamed top White House aide:
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… for the full article click here!
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