(Continued from Part 1.)
Interest on the National Debt
There are three categories in the US budget. Mandatory spending is mandated by law to be paid. Discretionary spending can be adjusted for each department, or the funding can be eliminated at any time. Interest payments are in their own category but for all intents and purposes are in the mandatory category.
The 2025 budget has the interest payment estimated at $969 billion, just a hair under one trillion. If I can tweak that up to $995 billion based on historical budget misses it will make the math easier as this discussion progresses. The interest paid on the debt amounts to 18.1% of Uncle Sam’s income and when added to the items already discussed, the total comes to 97.8%, and with veteran’s benefits (discretionary spending, not a part of defense spending) added in, totals 99.1% of Uncle Sam’s income. Ninety nine percent. The other 1% will most likely be added to the real total interest on the national debt before the fiscal year is over.
As the national debt grows by over a trillion and a half dollars each year, we can rest assured this interest expense will only increase. Economists have warned that it will soon be the single largest expense in the federal budget, and from there the sky’s the limit.
None of this 99% would have been necessary had we not disincentivized people to be self-reliant. Deficit spending would not have existed and the national debt could have been paid off a long time ago. If it was possible for Calvin Coolidge to have a balanced budget, and to even pay down 24.2% of the national debt, there’s no reason why today’s government can’t do the same by weaning us off these Ponzi schemes, welfare programs, and outrageous defense budgets. At the end of Coolidge’s term, taxes had been lowered, deficits eliminated, and interest on the debt was minimal. There were no social security, medicare, or welfare programs. Families took care of each other while churches and charities helped take care of the poor.
Fiscally Irresponsible Voters
We love to holler and pound our fists while we complain about our fiscally irresponsible Congressmen spending money with more gusto than a five-year-old in a candy store. We make lists of all the especially dumb things they spend it on: the effects of LSD on cats, the contribution of cow farts to global warming, and the annual Winchell’s donut bill at the FBI.
The truth be told, there are no fiscally irresponsible politicians, only fiscally irresponsible voters who keep sending these bozos to Washington. If we keep voting for them, it can only mean we agree with their spending policies. We’re far too concerned about their views on bump stocks and abortion instead of concentrating on what’s 100 times more important: unbalanced budgets and the national debt.
Now let’s move on to discretionary spending.
Discretionary Spending
Everything else Congress spends money on is discretionary. Every bit of discretionary spending is deficit spending and gets put on Uncle Sam’s credit card. All of it. Each year’s deficits are added to the national debt which is currently at $36 trillion and at the end of the fiscal year in June, will be $37.8 trillion or more. A balanced budget is when Congress spends just Uncle Sam’s annual income and no more.
This discussion of discretionary spending will demonstrate why deficit spending is mathematically possible, but not humanly possible, why the problem is not resolvable, and why the false hope that it is fixable will leave us unprepared for the financial Armageddon that’s coming.
Defense Spending
Because hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake for so many large corporations, the portion of the federal budget Americans have been the most heavily propagandized on, and therefore the least willing to trim, is the defense budget. It’s the single biggest waste of money in our country. While the entire defense program isn’t a waste, the waste comes from having a military that’s ten times larger than it needs to be. The largest portion of the defense budget doesn’t pay servicemen salaries, it goes to benefit the large corporations that make up the military-industrial complex (MIC). This should rightly be called the defense-industrial complex to keep Americans from confusing it with the military itself or members of the military.
Above all else, politicians care most about having their egos stroked and remaining in power. They stay in power by winning elections and they win elections by keeping large donors happy, who in turn keep the politicians happy with, among other things, high-paying “consulting” jobs after they retire from Congress. The cycle goes on and on with each new politician elected to Congress. This cycle applies to other large corporations as well, not just to the MIC.
With that said, I’ll cut right to the chase: our Department of Defense doesn’t keep order in the world, doesn’t spread freedom and democracy, and it sure as heck doesn’t keep us free. On the contrary, all of our US servicemen who’ve been killed or wounded since WW II died needlessly as a result of a bad US foreign policy. The defense department wasn’t keeping us free when 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 as a direct result of bad US foreign policy. The worst of the blowback from this bad foreign policy wasn’t the 3,000 souls who perished, but rather, the government using the 9/11 events as an excuse to strip away more of our rights than all previous administrations put together had done when they passed the Patriot Act. This affects all 330 million Americans.
The general public doesn’t understand that our military’s prime focus isn’t defense, but to act as the muscle to carry out America’s foreign policy goals, which only rarely benefit We the People. While there’s disagreement about whether Henry Kissinger actually said it or not, the general principle is true: “Military men are… used as pawns in foreign policy.”
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of US foreign policy isn’t about national security or keeping us free, rather, it functions to pave the way for the large corporations who bought off Congress long ago. Once the gates are open, these corporations can essentially rape and pillage the resources of those countries where US foreign policy is being implemented. The general American public fails to grasp that they gain nothing from these policies other than a country deeper in debt and closer to financial Armageddon. Only the large corporations benefit. The CIA and military also help corporations who may be having troubles in a country when newly-elected officials want to make changes that benefit their citizens instead of large American corporations. I’ll let the reader do their own research on what happened in Iran, our former ally, in 1954.
Successful propaganda campaigns by both the MIC, other corporations, and politicians prevent Americans from seeing the truth that’s so obvious to those standing outside the circle looking in.
When these foreign policy decisions, carried out by the defense department, result in blowback as it did on 9/11, Americans are totally mystified about how it could happen. They’re easily swayed by more propaganda making the US look like the victim instead of the instigator. When Baby Bush proclaimed sheer nonsense, “They hate us for our freedom!” we ate it up. Freedom is an emotionally-moving word. “Payback” is an ugly word that reveals too much about our foreign policy.
All wars and military actions since WW II were initiated needlessly and resulted in nothing but debt, heartache for the families of the dead and wounded, and large profits for the MIC and other companies who go in afterward and clean up the mess. We the People benefited nothing. Had these wars had any justifiable reasons, they wouldn’t have been initiated using a false-flag operation or other lies by politicians who knew better. Bell Helicopter and other defense contractors knew the Vietnam War wasn’t justified, nor did they care. Bell made millions of dollars selling 12,000 helicopters to the Defense Department. The cost to We the People? 58,193 dead servicemen, over 150,000 wounded, and 1,600 still missing.
If this is all information about the defense department and the relationship between Congress and the MIC is too hard to believe, for those not afraid of the truth Brigadier General Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket is a good place to start. He was one of the most highly-decorated military men in US history and as he rose through the ranks to become a general, he saw many of the inner workings of the Defense Department. He gives example after example of the missions he carried out all over the world which had no benefit for We the People. He stated, “I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and the bankers.” An even lengthier list can be compiled today on missions carried out in the name of Big Oil and all the other large corporations who own Congress.
For more info on how it all works, if you haven’t read Kash Patel’s Government Gangsters, I highly recommend it. President Trump has selected Patel to be the head of the FBI. The back cover of his book indicates he was “a former top official in the White House, the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of Justice.”
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 3.)