The road to hell is paved with good intentions
There is little doubt that most politicians and most voting citizens are sincere in their thoughts about all the financial mess we are in.
What is most alarming, and suggestive that the worst is yet to come, is the fact that most of what our federal politicians are doing is being paid for with borrowed money. There is much to suggest this decades long era of borrowing to finance good intentions will come to an end, and then we will have to pay as we go. Less one doubts this possibility; remember as recently as World War Two we had to have war bond drives to get Americans to loan enough to finance this war. Then the politicians will have to earn their pay, like earlier times when priorities were set, public policy practiced, and we had to live within our means. And our means are quite considerable.
Too much of our present borrowed monies now come from overseas, so now there are foreign considerations.
Most Americans have bought into the ideas of helping our less well off. That much of this was financed with borrowed monies and increased tax incomes was seldom spoken about by all our politicians, whether at the federal, state, county, city, or school board levels. Thank goodness, some of these entities are better off, and hats off to those fellow Americans with more foresight in financing their entity, and planning for a rainy day.
It is alarming that even the Social Security and Medicare funds the federal government has collected for decades have been raided as another source of monies. Now what is to happen?
What is also galling is that many hard working Americans are being dragged down in the financial mess we are in. Now they are sharing in the hard times. Will anyone tell them thank you for all they have supported in the past.
We Americans went through a War of Independence, a revolutionary war. One often cited reason by those who made up the resistance was taxation without representation. Now the federal politicians are doing that to our future American citizens, and dragging them down most likely. Now many of these future generations might rather default on what their ancestors have done since they did not get a vote.
And at many local levels many politicians are already giving priorities to providing job programs at the expense of basic government functions like police and fire protection, waste water treatment, pothole maintenance, and real public school education that benefits our children. Only the people’s votes can change these priorities it seems.
One’s thoughts on all this mess we are in often has to do with when do we bite the bullet, as in the auto manufacturing discussion going on today. Too many are talking past each other, and not even mentioning the question and timing of when we do bite the bullet. Now this is a voter issue.
And the voting American citizens who are the beneficiaries of all these good intentions may predominate in the votes at all levels. But predomination will not change what happens when others will no longer loan the USA monies to finance all these well intentioned benefits.
What is a shame is that many good American providers are being dragged down with the less well off beneficiaries.