Issue Position: National Debt

Issue Position

We need to stop the war on the American taxpayer and stop the spending.

There are no Democrat or Republican leaders with the moral or intellectual courage to deal with this most critical issue facing our nation today, the growing massive national debt. The leaders of so-called major parties have not only bankrupted our country, they are morally and intellectually bankrupt as well, lacking the courage needed to repair the damage they've done to our nation. No Republican or Democrat has the courage to stand up and tell the American people the truth. The truth is we cannot even begin to reduce our debt by slowing spending, lowering spending or even cutting spending. We must stop the spending.

The recommendations by President Obama's budget commission and the reaction from both liberals and conservatives to those ideas was predictable and proved this point. The commission didn't come up with anything new or radical. They recommended the usual politically safe ideas, reduce spending and raise taxes, as other commissions and studies have done before. Nevertheless, liberals and Democrats immediately screamed "We can't cut spending,' while conservatives and Republicans shouted "We can't raise taxes.'"

Nor can we "nickel-and-dime" our way out of the problem. It's easy and popular to go after programs like earmarks and foreign aid, but these are only a small part of the federal budget. We must stop spending on items that make up 60 to 75 percent of the federal budget -- defense and entitlements.

Until we elect leaders with the courage to address spending in these areas we'll never be able to get the debt under control, let alone reduce it.

Of course it is dangerous and not "politically correct" to suggest cutting spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare. Anyone who even hints at making any changes to these "sacred cows" is quickly vilified as someone who hates the elderly. That's typical political demagoguery used by politicians without integrity or intellectual honesty.

The truth is politicians have lied to seniors for decades, and are still lying to them. The truth is that Social Security and Medicare are Ponzi schemes perpetuated for decades by politicians. They are classic examples of the way politicians bribe one group of people using money taken from another group of people to buy votes.

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale." -- Thomas Jefferson

These programs are unsustainable because they can only be supported by taking more and more money from more and more people. That means taking money from the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the very people who paid into the programs in the first place. Taxing our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to pay for our retirement is not only immoral, it's economically destructive.

This doesn't mean that the federal government should renege on the promises made to people who have paid into federal benefit programs. Libertarians recognize these entitlements as actual contractual obligations which must be honored. The federal government has the assets to make good on the promises made to seniors.

We can begin by selling off the millions of acres of land owned by the federal government. Then the federal government can sell off other assets it shouldn't have in the first place, including power companies, oil and mineral rights and unused military bases in order to fulfill these contracts.

And while we're securing the payments for the people who have already been scammed we should immediately end the programs so that future generations won't be harmed.

Defense and national security are also areas where anyone who suggests cuts is demonized or labeled unpatriotic. Yet Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently called the debt the most significant threat to our national security. But Mullen hasn't proposed a credible way to deal with that threat. On the contrary, he proposes to counter this threat by increased military spending and increased military intervention around the world, actions that will drive us deeper into debt.

Politicians are fond of claiming that what they are doing, especially when it involves spending, is "for the children." Yet the spending they approve burdens every child born in America today with over $40,000 in debt. The best thing we can do "for the children" is to eliminate that debt.

Source