The Aftermath or How the Tea Party Learned to Love Big Government by Bill Buppert

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
– Alexis de Tocqueville

I have several predictions for the new Congress just elected in November 2010:

1.   The deficit and debt will continue to skyrocket.
2.  The US will continue to make war on the world.
3.  No government department will be destroyed , dismantled or suffer budget cuts.
4.  The Treasury Department and the Fed will continue their collusion to drive the value of the fiat dollar to zero.
5.  Liberties and freedoms will continue to diminish.

Republicans will continue an historic trend of big budgets and bigger spending.  The Tea Party will quite likely be a tempest in a…teapot and then the GOP will get back to business as usual.  And yes, the Tea Party has been co-opted by the GOP and not vice versa,  Despite the propaganda to the contrary, the Grand Old Politburo has tended to be just as spendthrift as their Democrat doppelgangers.  They are not a party of thrift and frugality but a political faction just as wedded to centralized control and spending with the added benefit of being easily seduced by the Democrat siren song for war that they sang during the first 68 years of the twentieth century.  The advocacy of war abroad always brings the more unpleasant aspects of exported violence home.  Witness the self-immolation of ALL aspects of liberty in the United Kingdom.

The two parties are simply the two left-wings on the statist bird of prey that happens to be the Federal government.  Slavers of a more sophisticated variety but slaveholders nonetheless.

R.W. Bradford, the late and great editor of Liberty magazine, avers:

But much more importantly, the correlations between spending and political parties changed radically. Prior to fiscal year 1970, there were very strong correlations between fiscal restraint and Republican control of the White House and Congress, and between spending increases and Democratic control of those institutions. Since then, there has been hardly any correlation, despite the fact that Republican candidates for office generally claim to favor fiscal restraint and Democratic candidates for office generally claim to favor the expansion of government.

The Bush II years provide ample evidence that Republican thrift is a myth and the Democrats have followed suit under Obama.

By comparison, please note that Democratic President Bill Clinton increased the National Debt by less than $18 Billion in his ENTIRE LAST YEAR in office! A far cry from what Bush and the Republicans gave us.

Bill Clinton steadily reduced the debt increase while he was in office, thanks largely to the 1993 Debt Reduction Act* that was OPPOSED BY EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN IN CONGRESS, led by Newt Gingrich! The Republicans claimed that the Debt Reduction Act would result in HIGHER deficits and also result in an economic recession during President Clinton’s term. Obviously, with hindsight they were completely wrong. This is not to say that Clinton was a great President, we have not had one of those since Grover Cleveland (and there are only a handful) but the behavior of the President in fiscal matters was better than what his successors would do.

This is not to diminish Obama’s fiscal illiteracy as he has done in nearly two years in office what it took almost 200 years to tally before the end of the 1980s.  The total acknowledged debt [ed:  I say acknowledged because I do not trust the government to keep honest books] now is 13.6 trillion, up from 10.6 trillion in the month Obama took his wrecking oath in Mordor; he did this in an astonishing 20 months time.

The system WILL collapse because it is historically unprecedented and economically illiterate to think otherwise.  The problem is revenue and spending.  The conventional answers are backwards, you do not raise taxes to meet present spending.  You determine what level of spending is legitimate and cut everything else.  IN a perfect world, the Federal government would not even exist and all the respective states would peacefully leave the Union and form voluntary confederation arrangements in their respective regions. Taxes will go up and production will go down.  A sure recipe to speed along the inevitable collapse.

Here is an example of how the present spending trends look:

Do you notice a peculiar trend for the Socialist Security spending?  Every two years, it is increasing by roughly fifteen percent which means that in twelve years it doubles.  It continues and ironically will not be stopped until it collapses.

Some conventional wisdom recommends cutting our defense by 50% and I would suggest we could cut it by 80% or more and still be safe.  The military-industrial complex is not necessarily an efficient conduit of job creation for dollars spent:

… defense spending creates 8,555 total jobs with $1 billion in spending. This is the fewest number of jobs of any of the alternative uses that we present.

Mind you, the authors were your typical collectivists whose only economic universe is comprised of the sheared and the shearers so their prognostications did not include the benefits of the sheared retaining more of their income to freely and creatively make job opportunities happen.

You will not see the Department of Defense cut nor our war on the world cease under Republican stewardship of the purse-strings in Congress.

And no, the record level of Federal employees (2.15 million) will not be cut…even by one.  And, incidentally, this does not include the figures for contracted employees of the Federal government

From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.

Including both the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service workers.

The administration says 79 percent of the increases in recent years are from departments related to the war on terrorism: Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, State and Veterans Affairs.

After years of decline at the end of the Cold War, the Defense Department is restaffing. Mr. Obama estimated that the Pentagon will have 720,000 employees this year and 757,000 employees next year – up from a low of 649,000 in 2003.

The Republicans will continue the statist quo.  They may have control of the house but they will not control themselves.

The impending doom continues…

“The concentrating [of] these [legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government.”

-Thomas Jefferson