ARE WE TO BE PRO-ACTIVE PROBLEM FIXERS….
(or just continue being high maintenance whiney bitches, yapping from the sidelines about them?)

Any thinking citizen and taxpayer of this great republic must realize by now that our economic and political structures have gone terribly awry. Equally obvious is the fact that, if nothing is done to set things right, America, as we have known it, may not last another century.

And our biggest problem, above all else, is our fiscal situation. We have become a debtor nation, well on the way to just being another banana republic, if we don’t do something about it. All of which means this is not the time for us to tolerate ideologically driven drivel or debates about our situation. What we need is common sense, pragmatic, discussions on the best ways and means to fix the problem. Thus, anytime we hear one of our glorious members of this new and supposedly “reform-minded” Congress, mouthing off about the issue, and obviously just doing so to enhance his or her future political position at the polls, we need to roundly tell them to….shut up….quit playing games….get to work….or you’re out of there….next election.

Well, despite my less than expert knowledge about such things as economics, fiscal and monetary policy, etc., I do have some exposure to these subjects, so here are some ideas about ways and means to restore ourselves to some semblance of fiscal sanity:

1)Re: Our Debts. Much like credit-card junkies we voters have supported years of   congressional splurging on our behalf, borrowing from any source willing or dumb enough to lend us whatever we’ve wanted for our high-living needs. And to that end we’ve hocked just about every hard asset we have, including much of our gold and silver reserves supposedly backing our dollar, not to mention the so-called lock boxes of Social Security and Medicare surplus funds (picked from the pockets of both our worker bees and retirees) all in exchange for Treasury I.O.U.s ostensibly based on the “full faith and credit” of our government. And the three major creditors holding these markers of ours are the UK, China, and Japan, along with a host of other nations as well. But, the problem isn’t these markers themselves because these creditors still have some confidence in our ability to pay them back….if only just barely.

The main cause of any eroding confidence about that ability is because in recent times the Treasury has been running its printing presses 24/7/365, effectively “devaluing” those markers with fully depreciated (perhaps –depressed might be a more accurate description) dollars.  Common sense, therefore, should tell us that a useful first step in turning things around, is to begin turning off those printing presses (while I’d prefer to just padlock them….we’re too far in the hole to do so all at once, without causing some serious economic paroxysms, so it will have to be done as a slow and gradual process). If we don’t do that, we face ultimate catastrophic hyperinflation.

2) Re: Deficits: Concurrent to that, reining in our spending level is a close second measure that needs to be taken. And rather than wasting time arguing about where and how to cut down on spending, our best bet is to simply apply the concept of – proportional distribution of any deficit – among the three branches of the government. The reasoning for that being, since they create these deficits they should be the first ones to have to…eat them.

And such a concept might work because it would be politically….neutral…. since no particular programs would be singled out for radical cuts, so no special interests or advocacy for these would have grounds for complaint. Thus hard line ideologues of the extreme Left and Right fringes of both parties could support it.

The way that would work is this: Each branch of the government would have to absorb a slice of any deficit in any given fiscal year, based upon its percentage share of the government’s total budget.

As an example, if the Executive Branch accounts for, say, 60% of the total budget, it would have to eat 60% of any deficit for that year. In turn, it would then distribute that deficit slice among all its departments, agencies, commissions, etc. based on their respective percentage shares of the Executive’s budget, and so on, down to the last budgetary level. Each of the other two branches of government would do the same. The result would be that the entire deficit load would be equitably spread throughout the whole government structure. And the odds are only inherent contingency and fudge factors in any annual budget would be cut. Most programs would hardly be affected, and we might end up with a leaner and less wasteful government machinery.

These are just some first workable baby steps towards inching down both our debt burden and our deficits.

And if to that we were to seek ways and means to quietly restore our gold and silver reserves,  from where they are today, back up to perhaps 40%-50% of our national debt level; then, our good old greenback might slowly recover some real value. As it is now, antique Monopoly dollars are probably worth more as collectibles….than the ones being printed by our Treasury today.

3) Re: Taxes: No question about it, the existing tax code is a mess. So, if we’re serious about fixing our economic and financial condition, for now and for the future, we’re going to have to do something about reforming it. It needs some drastic reconfiguration, if not re-calibration, and not by wild class-warfare rhetoric either. Perhaps the most effective way to do it is to replace it with some kind of a simple –Flat Tax on Gross Income From All Sources- for both individual and businesses, limiting the number and type of exemptions or write-offs. Individual and business tax rates might be set at four or five bracket categories, and these, fixed for ten year periods, with any increases limited to a very narrow percentage any time Congress feels the need to raise those tax rates. I would also add the requirement for a two-thirds majority in both chambers to do that.

In short, these are some of the measures that might help bail us out from under our debt load and deficit spending. We need to decide, therefore, whether we are to be pro-active problem fixers on these issues, or just continue being high maintenance whiney bitches, yapping from the sidelines about them.

It’s up to us.

CENTURION