How the United States get into such a mess and how it can survive. Maybe.

An Unincorporated Division of The Anonymous Anything Society October 9, 2013

Comment from the Blogosphere: "We ought to clean house before the patients take over the insane asylum."

Dear Reader,

Stop blaming anyone but yourself, because we are all to blame. We the people are the government of this republic, are we not? Do we intend to keep failing to govern ourselves properly?

Basic Third Grade Economics: A deficit in the U. S. Treasury occurs when the government takes in less money than it spends.

Not only that, but the private sector went on, year after year, spending more than our combined income. Call it a buying binge. Credit became our way to Nirvana.

For reasons apparently beyond our control, cheap labor enabled other countries, beginning with Japan, to create a massive trade deficit. Though a growing imbalance of payments should have caused us to freak-out long ago, we became accustomed to our fate. America is no longer the "Factory For the Free World."

Unions did what they were created to do and then some. They over-protected wages and were outbid by cheap labor overseas - even when shipping costs are enormous.

Here's why there is hope: Bill Clinton balanced the budget for the first time in decades. He accomplished much simply by riding the crest of a burgeoning economy due to the success of Reaganomics.

Clinton also did something that turned terribly wrong. He encouraged the Federal Home Loan folks to lend, and lend and lend, sending financial institutions into a money-lending frenzy. Until the bubble burst, they made lots and lots of bad loans.

At the same time, Clinton also decided that we ought to solve the ethnic wars in Yugoslavia, which we did - for the time being.

George Herbert Walker Bush (Bush I) then made the Kuwait oil fields off limits to Sadaam Hussein, late of Bagdad, Iraq, while leaving his Republican Guard intact.

History will record that George W. Bush (Bush II) and his wrecking crew soon embarked on a monumental waste of our national resources in a futile search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq is once again a bloody battleground between two Muslim sects within the hegemony of the Shite - controlled theocracy of Iran.

Let's not even discuss the failed state of Afghanistan, where the basic underpinning of the society; their gross domestic product, being the production of opium poppies and will continue to be after the Taliban gains control over it once again.

Barack Obama has yet to understand that we simply cannot afford any new spending.

Depressing isn't it? Despite the pain of angst and "should have dones," we simply cannot have the United State default on its payments to creditors. That is instant disaster. Nothing we will have endured so far will more greatly damage us, collectively and individually.

I suggest that every one of our Federal Legislators immediately make a grocery list of things that must be sacrificed, whether it be a new bridge, or the furloughing of no less than a quarter of the governmental jobs in their districts and radically reduced their own personal prerogatives.

Our lawmakers should put the pork back in the pot and attack the budget for their districts "with a club and a sword." They should then send the president a budget showing a real sense of collective sacrifice instead of blackmailing him over a law already passed by the legislative branch of government.

You had your chance, Lemmings. Until the Healthcare act is fully in force, will we know if it is a destructive as detractors claim.

We'll soon find out won't we?

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Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller

If you wish to comment, Phil can be reached at:

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My thanks to Jim Bromley for providing an ARCHIVE of prior blogs.

"@AgainRight"