He Who Has Ears To Hear, Let Him Hear!
If you read only one piece on the hand-in-glove relationship between the debt ceiling crisis and out of control social program spending, let it be this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Quoth the sages of Wall Street:
According to the most recent government data, today some 50.5 million Americans are on Medicaid, 46.5 million are on Medicare, 52 million on Social Security, five million on SSI, 7.5 million on unemployment insurance, and 44.6 million on food stamps and other nutrition programs. Some 24 million get the earned-income tax credit, a cash income supplement.
By 2010 such payments to individuals were 66% of the federal budget, up from 28% in 1965. (See the second chart.) We now spend $2.1 trillion a year on these redistribution programs, and the 75 million baby boomers are only starting to retire.
Hmm. Someone, just yesterday, was politely reminding all minions that we cannot solve our debt problem without addressing entitlement programs.
To borrow from our president, let ‘Puter be clear. If the federal government did not borrow money, nearly every penny of the $2.2 trillion in tax revenues collected last year would go to cash handouts to individuals.
No money for defense. No money for roads. No money for education (regardless of whether it is a federal responsibility or not). No money for cancer research. No money for space. No money for regulators, whatever you think of them.
When stripped to its essentials, it is clear that our federal government has become nothing more than a giant wealth transfer scam, leaving the saps who are late to the Ponzi scheme holding the bill. That’s you and me, dear reader.
And that is why we must — must — address spending.
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.