Tuesday After
Restoring the Lost Republic
Capital Building - Yahoo Finance
Yesterday evening I heard the news of a major credit rating agency’s downgrade of our national credit worthiness from AAA to AA+. I wish I could feign surprise but that level of dishonesty is not in my moral character. And in a sense that is part of the problem we face; failure as a society to reject the government theft of property from one group of individuals to purchase power through welfarism. This welfarism is the root cause creating the ever increasing debt; we have a spending problem not a revenue problem. Sadly the media en mass seems to overlook that critical little fact. Even the rating agencies seem to be stuck in the failed Keynesian philosophy of Government control through spending and debt to manage an economy over proven free market solutions that could actually turn this and every other world economy around.
The Fox Business article, which contributed in part to the tag line of this piece focuses on the politics surrounding the recent debt ceiling debate rather than trumpet the real issue the public needs to awaken to.
The heated debate on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the White House stalled repeatedly during months of negotiations, leading S&P to question the “effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policy making.”
Flipping through today’s WSJ I came across the quoted letter written in response to the July 30th “Hobbit” opinion piece. Kudos to Mr. Stevenot. Well said!
Regarding your editorial “The Debt-Limit Hobbits” (July 30): I join with my other southwest Ohio tea-party leaders in opposing the Boehner plan because we’ll get less than 3% “real” spending cuts in a government that has bloated 40% in four years, and this is not enough. Authorizing $1 trillion in new debt today for the promise of cuts which may or may not work out to be more than that over 10 years is an unfavorable deal.
Kudos to the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, Jim Jordan, Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and others for standing on principle and opposing this plan.
As for Middle Earth, to quote Gandalf, standing before the hordes of Mordor at the Black Gate, “Surety you crave! Sauron gives none. If you sue for his clemency you must first do his bidding. These are his terms. Take them or leave them” . . . But as for your terms, we reject them utterly. . . . Begone!”
Ted Stevenot
Co-founder
Clermont County Tea Party
Cincinnati
Do you feel relieved? Has that debt default burden been lifted from your shoulders? You should. Those calm and attentive Senators have saved us from our intransigent focus on actually addressing the core issue the debate ignored, “it’s the spending stupid!” The ink barely dry from the President’s signature and Speaker Reid is already proposing another round of Stimulus. The President, bless his soul, felt it was important to remind us last November’s election was a mandate for divided government, not dysfunctional government.
So what do we get with Compromise? A modest reduction in planned increases (no real cuts) that will give us another $7,000,000,000,000.00 added to the debt over the next ten years. I fully expect a downgrade of our bond rating as a nation by the end of September.
Don’t hang this on the Republicans, for that matter, don’t hang it on the Democrats either. What we have been facing for the past 80 years is a battle of ideologies; those who hold the concept of Liberty as reinforced by the unalienable right to Property facing off against those who place their faith in the Socialist Utopia of Progressivism. The fight to restore Liberty requires personal effort to understand our founding documents and restore them. This last fiasco further demonstrates the insanity of socialism. We may no longer be on the Road to Serfdom, we may have already arrived!
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein
Today we wake to the news that a compromise has been reached in the looming debt crisis. Sadly that compromise is more of the same hollow Washington gamesmanship. I looked for a copy of the proposed bill and thanks to Jake Tapper on Twitter a link to the 74 page spending bill was provided. I do not profess a legal background and Lord knows how far into the weeds you must go to understand the statutory language but the bottom line is the measure does nothing to reduce debt and only hints at a Balanced Budget Amendment.
I woke up this morning to the news of a Government shutdown being averted. “It’s morning in America” as Ronald Reagan is often credited as saying. Sadly little appears to have changed. Many news sources appear to be trumpeting the success achieved in bringing intransigent Republicans around to accepting approximately 38.5 Billion dollars in cuts for the remainder of the budget year. The Philadelphia Post-Gazette online carried a New York Times piece by Carl Hulse; Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown; Vote Set Next Week After 6-Day ‘Bridge’ detailing the generalities of the debate.
The article built as its premise budget cuts and fiscal sanity as the drivers behind the public mood in general and TEA Party specifically with regard to the Federal Government. Mr. Hulse quotes Speaker Boehner, presumably coming out of the late night meetings “This has been a lot of discussion and a long fight. But we fought to keep government spending down because it really will in fact help create a better environment for job creators in our country.” He goes on to quote the President’s response “Programs people rely on will be cut back. Needed infrastructure projects will be delayed.” In my opinion these two quotes show how fundamentally disconnected the elites in the Capital are from the public who sent them there.
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