🚀 go-pugleaf

mpye@NETCOM.COM (Michael Pye) writes:
>By Sue Ellyn Scaletta
>Knight-Ridder Newspapers
> 
> 
>* If you had a stack of $1,000 bills 4 inches thick, you'd be a 
>millionaire.  And you'd need a stack 256 miles high to pay off what 
>your indulgent Uncle Sam has borrowed on your behalf.  Your share is 
>now $16,000.

And a household's share is $40,000.  Then add to that what is being
covered up by the so-called Social Secirity trust fund, and you get
$120,000.

>* Conrad's statements are supported by the General Accounting Office 
>report that says the U.S. economy will shrink 40 percent by the year 
>2020 if the country continues its "muddling through" approach to 
>budgeting and spending.  "Failure to reverse these trends in fiscal 
>policy and the composition of federal spending will doom future 
>generations to a stagnating standard of living, damage U.S. 
>competitiveness and influence in the world, and hamper our ability to 
>address pressing national needs," the report concludes.  "We 
>conclude, in fact, that the present situation if flatly 
>unsustainable," sayd Henry Havens, the assistant comptroller general 
>who supervised the report.

They're wrong.  They're grossly understating the effect and timeframe
the problem will have on the existing political institutions and
overstating its effect on the people.

Its effect on the existing governments is to lead to their imminent
bandruptcy and dissolution, exactly as happened to the Soviet Union
after it too declared bankruptcy, exactly as happened to the feudal
monarchies in their final days after they too declared bankruptcy, and
exactly as happened to the Roman Empire in its final days of economic
exhaustion.

Economic exhaustion is the actual mechanism by which governments fall.

Its effect on the people in the long term is nil, because there won't
be a long term.  People once made fully aware of the problem will flat
out refuse to pay back this debt and become complicit in this massive
exercise in social and economic inequity.  The government will be
faced with a choice of either austerity or bankruptcy and will have to
choose the latter if it is to avoid a needless bloodbath.

The fallacy is assuming there is a long-term.  By 2020 we'll be
propsering in a far more equitable but completely different social,
economic and political setting, and it won't be our current system.

The time for historical change has drawn imminently near.

[I'd be interested to hear what different scheme will be in place
 by 2020.  -CWM]