(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.)
Can Our Fiscally Irresponsible Congress be Reined In?
While it’s certainly mathematically possible to balance the budget, it’s not humanly possible. An eighth-grade math class in Peru or Portugal, having no preconceived illusions about US spending, and no prejudices about what to cut, could balance the budget. Musk said he could strip $2 trillion from the budget. So could I, but Congress won’t pass most of the DOGE recommendations. It’s also not humanly possible to balance the budget because not only do fiscally irresponsible voters keep sending the wrong people to Congress, but those same voters can’t even agree on where to make the necessary cuts to balance the budget.
For all the reasons outlined above, and for all the resistance readers are putting up over what’s been pointed out in this article, we shouldn’t be foolish enough to think that very much will be done as far as deficits and the national debt go. It feels wonderful to see all the federal DEI programs canceled, to live again in a two-gender country, and to hear what sounds like Trump repeating his first administration policy of not starting any wars. But all that feel-good stuff won’t change our fiscal problems in any truly meaningful way.
Can We Personally Do Anything?
We’re headed for a financial tsunami of some sort. Since the Radio Shack crystal ball I had when I was 8 is no longer functional, it’s hard to say exactly what that will look like, or when it will occur. The simple mathematics indicate that Uncle Sam will have to increase his income via taxes (including hidden ones like tariffs), or decrease the amount of money he’s paying out, or a combination of both. A third option is to devalue the currency, as Roosevelt did in 1934, when he signed the Gold Reserve Act. This both revalued the price of gold, and effectively demonetized gold, domestically. All of these options can slow down where we’re headed, but can’t prevent financial TEOTWAWKI.
As far as deficits and national debt go we’re powerless at this point to do anything about it. Deficit-wise it’s no longer relevant who’s in the White House or Congress, things will only speed up or slow down a little. Sooner or later the starboard-side passengers will be waving their “Live Free or Die” flags and the port-side passengers their LGBTQWTF flags as the USS America goes over the waterfall and crashes onto the rocky reef below.
Thinking otherwise is false hope and sets us up to be unprepared for whatever’s headed our way.
How to Prepare For the Inevitable
Fortunately, there are some things we can do as individuals to prepare. Since we have no idea how soon a federal financial reset will occur, or how severe the consequences will be in addition to high inflation, we should be preparing our own personal financial insurance policy.
The first thing we should concentrate on is getting our property paid off as quickly as possible so we have no mortgage. Our real estate is most important tangible asset to be holding. My grandfather had given me his dad’s WW I draft card. On the back was written name of the town, as well as the range, township, and section of the 160-acre farm he had purchased after the war. I found the county plat map from 1921 showing the boundaries and owners of each farm and plot of land. I couldn’t believe how many of the farms and properties on the plat were labeled as owned by banks who had held the mortgages. When the farmers couldn’t make the mortgage payments due to hard economic times, the banks foreclosed. It was heartbreaking to see that my great-grandparent’s 160-acre farm was one of them.
The second thing is to stock up on as many of the everyday things we’ll be using in the future anyway whether a prepper’s TEOTWAWKI occurs or not. This includes all the non-perishables we use from Ziploc bags, shoes and clothes, cleaning products, toiletries, reading glasses, to deck screws, just to name a few. Since we’ll be using these non-perishables at some future point anyway, we’re just buying ahead of time to beat inflation. We’ll also have the added benefit of having things we need if a financial catastrophe of some sort occurs to either devalue our money, or a more personal reason such as losing our job as so many did during the Great Depression.
Even with Trump in office and a Republican majority in Congress, he can’t save the day inflation-wise, it’s already cooked into the pudding. It could possibly be as high or higher than the 21% we’ve experienced in the past four years. It makes sense to buy things now and use them later.
Third, we can prepare for a financial TEOTWAWKI by putting some of our assets into gold or silver. Regardless of how much the dollar is devalued, either through inflation or a single-day devaluation as Roosevelt did, precious metals maintain their value. I’m too old to understand why Bitcoin is money but if I can’t hold it in my hand I stay away from it. Bitcoin is a pile of electrons, not a tangible asset.
I can’t help but wonder if real estate, historically one of the best possible investments, will maintain its value if any sort of a Great Depression 2 event occurs. Personally, I think not. While a good investment in normal times, a Great Depression 2 would create a lower demand for housing as unemployed people start living in two- and three-generation homes again, or single people start living with roommates who can split the rent, or others become flat-out homeless.
Currently, 68% of Americans live in one- or two-person households. Imagine what would happen if just 10 or 20% of those people moved in with family or roommates. The lower demand for housing would cause rent prices to decrease and empty units to increase, resulting in less income for owners who in turn, would have a harder time making their monthly mortgage payments. Many would have no choice but to sell into a market glut, further driving down real estate prices.
Conclusion
Personally, I’d prefer to see Congress double the annual deficit to speed up the inevitable financial Armageddon we can’t avoid. I’m not with the normal majority who are wishing and hoping the collapse will hold off until they’ve gone on to their reward. The USS America will crash on the rocky reef in one form or another and I’d prefer to have it happen on my watch rather than my grandchildren’s.
Since my voting record (up until I stopped participating in anything other than referendums) and lack of protesting helped get our country into this mess, I’d rather suck it up and pay the consequences of my actions rather than punish them.
Having grown up in a military family, as a voter I was too brainwashed believing that our military kept us free to care that the defense budget ate up so much of Uncle Sam’s income. Who cared about the national debt when we had such cool fighter jets like we saw in the Top Gun movies? I was too ignorant of the reality that large corporations bought off Congress many generations ago and that Congressmen put more value on their power and money than they do about We the People.
I was too enamored with Ronald Reagan to care that he tripled the national debt during his term in office. I was too busy making excuses for my Republican tribe when I watched every Republican president after Reagan increase the national debt by a larger percentage than any of the Democrat presidents except Obama (70% increase). Baby Bush more than doubled the national debt, but I was more concerned about his predecessor’s indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky to give Clinton credit for only increasing the national debt by 32%, one of the lowest presidents since Eisenhower (8.6%). I was too busy cussing Biden’s insanity to realize that his 29% was lower than Trump’s first-term 40%.
More people are interested in googling to see if that last paragraph is true about their political party’s deficits than they are in accepting that they’ve personally contributed to getting the country into this mess in the first place. We all have, by being fiscally irresponsible voters sending fiscally irresponsible idiots to represent us in Congress, election after election after election.
I hope if nothing else, you’ve figured out that we’re not going to fix deficit spending or lower the national debt. We’re human and while balancing the budget is mathematically possible, it’s not humanly possible due to our propaganda-based beliefs and no real desire to fix the underlying causes of our fiscal nightmare. My intent hasn’t been to offend the multitudes who this article has offended, but to hopefully wake some preppers up as to the idiocy of hoping the federal budget can ever be balanced, the national debt can ever be paid off, or that the USS America can be saved at the last minute by Trump, DOGE, or anyone else.
Instead of just ignoring this article, do yourself a favor and get out your calculator, pencil and paper, and figure out what you’d do to balance the budget, which programs you’d cut back spending on, and which ones you’d eliminate in order to balance the budget. Here’s where to begin. See page 141, table S-4. While doing that, notice how your own prejudices about various programs will prevent you from coming up with a balanced budget. But even if you can balance the budget, ask yourself which of your recommendations Congress, who cares about re-election more than anything else, is likely to approve. Then realize that what I’ve said is true: while the budget can be mathematically balanced, it’s humanly impossible to balance. When you see it can’t be balanced, next ask yourself what you can do to better prepare to make yourself and family more resilient to whatever financial catastrophe awaits us.
As with all prepping, we should prepare for as many of the possibilities as we can: Great Depression 2, currency devaluation, hyperinflation, etc. With a TEOTWAWKI event, we don’t know what form it will come in, or whether or not it will come in our lifetimes, but we prepare anyway. We should do the same with the financial unknown that lies ahead. Some will argue the odds of a TEOTWAWKI or financial event are so remote there’s no point in prepping. They have a point to some degree as far as whether or not a TEOTWAWKI event will happen in our lifetimes, but there’s always a point to prepping. The whole idea of trying to be as self-reliant as possible is a good thing and can help us survive our own little personal SHTF events.
As for financial prepping, everything we do to prepare for a financial TEOTWAWKI can only benefit us. With that sort of prepping we don’t even have to be “closet preppers,” family and friends will envy us for getting our mortgages paid off or investing in tangibles. We can use inflation as our excuse for stocking up on non-perishables.
We’ll be much better off psychologically and financially when we own our real estate free and clear. In some ways, a mortgage is a form of modern-day slavery. One of the most stressful gut-wrenching events of my life was losing my job when the parent corporation three levels up was sued for corruption and went bankrupt. The story made the Wall Street Journal. You can only imagine what I went through as the sole provider for a wife and kids and a mortgage to pay off. It was over 40 years ago but I still feel anxiety just remembering it.
We don’t know what the future holds for our country as far as the consequences of deficit spending and the national debt. The question is, in case it happens on our watch, are we doing anything to prepare for financial TEOTWAWKI?