“If Americans aren’t prepared for the hard choices needed to control the national debt, most voters here must have missed the memo…. Cutting the deficit and debt is the preferred prescription for the economy among 39% of Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted Nov. 19-21 shows. That tops other options, including raising taxes on the wealthy, cutting taxes and increasing stimulus spending.” (USA Today)
First of all, a “thank you” to all the politicians who dug this abyss we’re looking at today and to those who elected them to office (That’s all of us folks!)! That’s correct – We all had a hand in this fiasco! And if you “stayed home” and didn’t vote, don’t think for a minute you don’t deserve some of the blame – It’s our country and we’ve been treating her like a whore!
So let’s stop the “blame game” and face the tough choices we are going to have to make if we want to avert a total financial meltdown! We also need to abandon this “class warfare” the ‘progressives’ are foisting on working families. The richer among us are not our enemies and shouldn’t be singled out to pay for what we all helped create!
Don’t like the “tough words”? Well then, you ain’t gonna like the tough solutions coming down the pike! First I will lay out our ultimate goal to save our nation from bankruptcy and then we’ll list the steps we will need to do to allow for financial health for the nation.
You see, we do not have an “undertaxing” problem, we have an “overspending” problem! We, for much too long, have allowed our federal government to stray into areas not authorized by our Constitution and that has led us to the edge of the financial abyss. This just didn’t happen under Obama, although his congress has sped the problem up, and it didn’t start under Bush, although he and his Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, pushed the envelope out a little further with the TARP; this fiasco has been building since 1913!
Under Woodrow Wilson, a real scumbag, the 16th and 17th Amendments were ratified (supposedly) and the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act was passed, creating a private central bank owned by ten (10) banking families. Each one of these events contributed to what we are reaping today and all three events must be reversed or this will happen again and again!
Whether or not the 16th Amendment was properly ratified is a moot point at this time but it is being applied improperly on the American People! It is a lie that the federal government can assess a personal income tax on your compensation but they have been doing it since the end of WWII! The Supreme Court, on three (3) separate occasions, has ruled that the 16th Amendment gave Congress no new taxing authority! But through “words of art” and “color of law”, the IRS will throw your butt in jail if you refuse to pay the tax! But even this is a moot point today because the government has thrown enough Americans in prison, you will not find enough people willing to sacrifice their physical freedom to end the practice. The easiest way to correct this is to repeal the amendment!
The 17th Amendment drew us closer to the democracy our founding fathers feared. With it’s passage, the Senators became elected officials instead of appointed by the several states’ legislatures! This has hurt us in more ways than can be counted. The Senators were to be in the Senate to protect the interests of the State. One of the “checks & balances” of our founding document was virtually destroyed with the passage of this amendment! Since 1913, the Senators have been a “popularity contest” and the position became just another way to vote money from the Treasury and destroy the 10th Amendment! Whether or not the 17th Amendment was properly ratified is just wasted energy; we need to repeal the Amendment or wait until the next financial crisis to rear it’s ugly and it will!
But the ugliest of the ugly was the passage of the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act of 1913! There is no provision, even today, for a privately-owned “central bank” in our Constitution! The Federal Reserve is tasked with deciding the United States monetary policy. What? I thought that was Congress’ responsibility: Article I, Section 8 – Powers of Congress, Line 4 – “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;” (Sounds to me as if Congress is shirking it’s responsibilities once again!) Not only must we audit the fed, we must repeal the Federal Reserve Act! Creating the “Fed” was just the beginnings of the atrocities against America’s wealth!
Take a look at the Fed’s track record, remembering that their task was deciding our monetary policy: Preventing depressions was number 1 on their “hit list”. Need I say more? The Great Depression? How did they recommend to avert this debacle? “Raise taxes on the Corporations” is what Hoover did after the stock market crash of 1929. Today we know that just slows down a financial recovery. This action actually pushed us closer to the depression! Along comes FDR, you know, the ‘progressives’ hero! How did the Fed help out here? They recommended Keynesian Economics be applied and not only pushed us smack-dab into the worst depression the world has ever seen but prolonged the United States recovery by 8 to 10 years! Even Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, recognized the error of the “New Deal” when he said, “Eight years and all that money spent and it did no good whatsoever!”
Obviously, the Fed cannot prevent depressions, recessions, or financial meltdowns, in fact, they exacerbate them!
Okay, but have they helped us in our monetary policy? In 1913, the United States was on the Gold Standard, and the Congress had frozen the gold price at $18.00 to $20.00 per ounce (Our “Double Eagle” was a 1 oz. gold coin; makes it easy to remember). Prior to the creation of the Fed, the U.S. Treasury only coined money, by Constitution, and when you deposited your gold and silver in the bank, the bank would issue you “Bank Notes” that you could redeem for merchandise from any merchant who recognized the Bank Note; otherwise you withdrew some of your gold or silver to purchase merchandise – Not a real convenient system but an honest one! The Fed started issuing “Gold Certificates” and “Silver Certificates” so you could leave your gold and silver in the Federal Reserve Bank and most merchants were willing to accept the certificates because they were redeemable at any Federal Reserve Bank and not just at the bank of issuance (as the Bank Notes were). This worked just fine and the people were lulled into apathy on the issue and it limited the amount of money the federal government could borrow because we were still on the Gold Standard, which meant the government could only borrow up to the amount of gold and silver owned by the federal government – A spending check that hadn’t been destroyed yet! Then comes the 1933 War Powers Act – Quick question: Who were we at war with in 1933? I have come to the conclusion that FDR and the Congress declared war on the American People in 1933! Using the powers given to the President under this egregious act, FDR confiscated all gold bullion and coinage he could locate from the American People! They confiscated the gold out of the Peoples’ home safes, as well as commercial banks and safe deposit boxes! They confiscated the precious metal and gave Federal Reserve “Silver Certificates” in place of the gold and took the United States off the Gold Standard, placing us in the Silver Standard!
This placated the Federal Reserves owners until 1965 – Called the “Johnson Sandwich” coins, the United States Mint began producing coinage made up of nickel and copper, instead to the silver coins we used since 1796! Named after Lyndon B. Johnson, President at the time, the “sandwich” doesn’t taste like any sandwich you would want to eat! It was at this time, that the United States was removed from the “Silver Standard” and the Federal Reserve began issuing “Federal Reserve Notes”. If you remember anything about Accounting 101, a “note” is the acknowledgement of a debt! In other words, the Federal Reserve began producing “fiat money”. A money with no backing but the good name of the borrower!
Thus began the enslavement of the future generations of Americans to the banking families of the Federal Reserve Bank! Yes, Congress had to have known they were enslaving us but they do not care; their only thoughts are getting reelected! Even Ronald Reagan, one of my heroes, couldn’t stop and reverse this perverse trend; all he could do was slow it down! Essentially, the Fed will print as much fiat money as Congress wants to spend and they put it on contract to repay over time – They used to say that the national debt was money we owed ourselves but that was a lie told to us so we wouldn’t see the devastation of enslavement of the American People to the banking families and now to China and Japan!
Russia and China have reached agreement on oil production from Russia to China and it is not based on the dollar value! The rest of the world will be following suit because we have defaced and now set to devalue the dollar; the world has lost it’s standard due to our overspending by an out of control Congress!
We must repeal the Federal Reserve Act and put this nation back on the Gold Standard so our dollar will be trusted once again by other trading partners!
If we could accomplish all three (3) things today, (repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments and repeal the Federal Reserve Act) it will not save us from the financial meltdown that is imminent. The meltdown is so imminent, we have to do several other things to solve our immediate financial problems; those things are going to hurt! It’s like taking medicine for an illness: The cure tastes terrible but the alternative is death!
Initially, we must cut spending by 50%! We must eliminate entire departments, slash federal employment numbers, and slash entitlement programs! This cannot be an “across the board” cut; it must be targeted cuts that will reduce federal spending by 50%. That’s why it’s gonna hurt! It’s going to hurt because the federal government is trying to be all things to all people and are messing in areas not authorized by Constitution and most of these areas are better handled at the state or local levels!
Everything must be “on the table” for consideration for elimination but a few departments that come to mind immediately are the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security, and Labor; except for Homeland Security, the rest of these departments are not authorized by Constitution and are better handled by the states or locally and Homeland Security doesn’t need to be a department unto itself – It’s function could be absorbed and be a Division of the Dept. of Defense! Other departments could be eliminated and their roles absorbed but you can see there are an over-abundance of bureaucrats and they generate no revenue; they only cost us more tax dollars!
Next, we have to evaluate the entitlement programs with an eye to reducing or eliminating them altogether! Entitlements include Social Security, Social Security Disability, Medicare, and Medicaid. From my perspective, Medicaid and Social Security Disability should be state programs, if there is to be a program at all! It used to be that the family unit took care of disabled family members or hired somebody to care for them and it should be that way today! If the government wasn’t stealing so much from Americans, we could take care of our own – a time honored tradition!
Medicare is another unauthorized federal program we can do without! I had much better coverage before the feds forced me onto Medicare and if I were able to buy my insurance across state lines, opening up competition, I daresay I would get better coverage and my health care professionals would be much happier than today, when they are paid only a pittance by Medicare!
Social Security cannot survive as it is administered today and I hope there is a way to save it for those who rely on it today as their sole income for retirement but it will be forced to change. Again, this is a program that is better suited for the states, rather than the federal government. Government closest to the People governs best, with the consent of the governed!
There are no real answers in this article, just the problems and areas of solution. We need to create solutions for Congress and we had better do it quickly!
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