It feels like we’re dealing with an Amy Winehouse form of
governing.
“These overdoses happen because these guys drink 20 beers
and then reach for their heroin,” a friend of mine said after the
late star’s recent death, at 27. “You can’t think straight once
you’re totally blitzed.”
It seems the same with our politicians, overdosed on their
own importance. Their non-straight thinking and out of control
spending has already put us $14.3 trillion in the hole at the
federal level, not counting the tens of trillions in unfunded
entitlement liabilities, and they’re still racking up $4 billion
per day in new red ink.
Even with the deal in Congress to supposedly cut $2
trillion or $3 trillion in federal spending over the next 10 years,
the national debt would still firmly be on a trajectory to increase
by another $8 trillion to $10 trillion over the coming
decade.
Part of the problem in all this is that eighth graders
can’t vote. The self-absorbed politicians, always fixated on their
re-election, know it’s safer to play Santa Claus than Scrooge, and
so we get more and more “free” goodies from the government and the
re-elected politicians just keep passing the bill onto our children
and grandchildren.
Per person, the national debt now comes to nearly $50,000
for every man, woman and child in America — $200,000 for each
family of four.
But not everyone’s going to pay. No kid is going to pick
up the tab from the sales at his lemonade stand, about 50 percent
of households don’t pay any federal income taxes, 20 percent of
working-age American males between the ages of 25 and 54 are not
working (and layoffs are increasing), so it’s clear that the
$50,000 debt burden per capita is going to be far from equally
distributed.
“The national debt per taxpayer calculates to $128,000,”
reports Roy Filly at The Rugged Individualist.
But everyone shouldn’t pay, according to President Obama’s
“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for
everybody” redistributionist philosophy and leveling
goals.
“According to our President, the ‘rich’ are the top 5
percent of earners,” writes Filly. “If we divide the national debt
among the top 5 percent of earners, then each of them owes
$2,539,068. Importantly, the top 5 percent of earners range in
earnings from something a bit more than $150,000 (which, by the
way, is household income, not individual income) on up.”
Obama doesn’t adjust his definition of the “rich” for the
different cost of living in different locations. A two-income
couple living in Manhattan with total annual earnings of $150,000
aren’t likely to see themselves as living high.
So let’s change the target to the real super-rich to pay
off the debt, the guys Obama likes to portray as joyriding around
in their corporate jets. “Honey, let’s gas up the Gulfstream and
shoot over to Dairy Queen for some chocolate-vanilla
twisties.”
The “fair share” of the current national debt for these
targeted super-rich? “The extremely affluent — those making more
than $1,500,000 per year — would each owe $96,230,700, or every
penny they make for the next 64 years,” writes Filly.
Add the nearly $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities to
the $14.3 trillion national debt and it’s clear that we’d have to
wipe out the entire upper class in order to make even a small dent
in the red ink.
In an earlier era, pursuing his egalitarian utopia with
vigor, Stalin slaughtered millions of kulaks, Russia’s “rich”
peasants, identified as those whose ramshackle shacks had two
windows instead of one.
