by Marc Cuniberti
America scratches its head and wonders why jobs are leaving despite the highest government spending in world history. We wonder why so many people need food stamps and unemployment checks despite more money being thrown at these programs than ever before.
Why what used to be the world's greatest economic power now is its greatest debtor and on the decline. We wonder why companies now prefer to do business elsewhere as industry after industry flees off shore. Why can't we make a good car anymore or get out of our own way when it comes to running a fiscally prudent government and query just how the freest country in the world became one of its most controlling. We have troops all over the globe yet let millions stream across our borders unfettered. We give billions to countries all over the world and billions more to banks, domestic and foreign yet let our elderly starve, our homeless wander and our needy go untended.
Our greased gears of government are now mired in deadlock and squabble over billions to the banking system while our citizens go hungry.
The top earners of America get ever richer while middle America can barely make ends meet not to mention that over 50 % of Americans are so poor they can't afford to pay income tax. One in four Americans get some sort of assistance from the government and two dollars of every ten earned in America comes from the same source.
What happened to our once great country?
Somewhere along the line Americans got lazy and veiled it in the words “compassion” and “entitlement”.
We confused freedom with our perceived rights. We forgot that our forefathers created this nation for men to be free. Free of government intervention, freedom from others looking to take what we rightfully earned, free to spend our money where we wanted, free to succeed and free to fail. Somewhere during the last 100 years, we yielded to those calls of economic exploitation and lack of compassion and fell victim to the myth of economic equality. Somewhere America fell victim to those that felt income equality on all levels was a God given right, not an earned one and that a small group of men knew better than all of us where to spend our hard earned dollars.
With the help of unlimited funds from the Federal Reserve, with the elimination of the gold standard, America went on a world-improving binge, spending not only its own century's money but the money of our children and now their children. Thinking we know better than our children where to spend THEIR money, we have gone so far into debt, it is all but impossible to pay it off. With total payouts and entitlements now estimated to exceed 100 trillion (no one really knows the actual number) the interest alone on this debt now requires an ever-increasing deficit. Talk of balancing the budget is ludicrous as the compounding of the debt alone is exponential and requires larger and larger deficits just to stay afloat.
Couple the spending spree to the movement to improve the populace and you can see why we are in the spot we're in. Unions bargained for more and more benefits, sick leave, healthcare and who knows what else. Minimum wage laws and quotas filled the ranks with the under-qualified and reduced the number of workers that could be hired. Overzealous redistribution taxes and emission mandates forced employer operating costs ever higher. Not versed in economics, regulators and politicians missed the basic premise that low-cost wages overseas would encroach on overburdened companies here and exports would make up the cost difference with lower pricetags. Companies, being good capitalists who have answer to shareholders, would leave for greener (and cheaper) pastures subsequently decimating our job base.
Put simply, you can’t have luxury healthcare, perfect air and water, paid child care, lavish pensions and six-week vacations when the country across the ocean produces its goods without any of these costs and at 1/10th the wages. Something had to give and our American jobs base was it.
Nature was only trying to equalize what we distorted. Employee costs went too high and economic osmosis took place.
Add in decades of government overspending on social policies run amok and idiotic anti-capitalistic policies like mandated home loans, job quotas, minimum wages and healthcare and then insult us with bailouts everywhere. Pay for it all with printed trillions, which is just more debt, and America is left tattered and staggering under her own excesses.
It’s a fact of life that flies in the face of world improvers and now the rest of have to live with the result. The free market knows best. Left on its own, capitalism works, folks, but what you are seeing now is the farthest thing from it. Burdened with social agenda and fed with paper money fiat, the end result is a country on the brink and no amount of printed money will rectify this flawed model of socialistic capitalism. If America wants to save herself, she must look to the document that founded her, The United States CONSTITUTION, follow it to letter and allow her citizens the true freedoms allocated there, both socially and economically.
Marc Cuniberti hosts “Money Matters” on KVMR 89.5 FM Thursdays at noon.
His website is www.moneymanagementradio.com
