Friday, February 26, 2010
Nightfall in America - WSJ.com
This is NOT a warm fuzzy scenario; not a rosy future at all.
Let's hope people keep writing about this so that Americans can see this dreadful path and vote accordingly...
Let's hope people keep writing about this so that Americans can see this dreadful path and vote accordingly...
This is part of Pete DuPont's opinion column in the Wall Street Journal:
"Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page did an analysis of the federal government's debt that will be held by the public over the coming decade. When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, the debt held by the public was 36.2% of GDP. It rose to 40.2% the next year. This year it will be about 63.6%, next year 68.6%, then 77% of GDP in 2020. And the Obama administration's budget estimates 218% in 2050.
The reason for these rising deficits is the huge increases in federal spending--the intended growth of the federal government--that Congress and the president are pushing. The deficit in 2007 was $160 billion. In the next year the Pelosi-Reid Congress took it up to $458 billion, and when President Obama came into office in 2009 it hit $1.4 trillion. The current 2010 projected deficit is $1.6 trillion, which will lead to a tripling of our national debt from 2008 to 2020.
To the White House and congressional Democrats, these large figures are not a surprise, a mistake or a worry. They part of a strategy to Europeanize America, to make the government larger, broader and in charge of almost everything. And that would of course require broad and massive tax increases. The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson calculated that to fund all the future deficit expenditures would require taxes to increase 'by roughly 50 percent from the average 1970-2009 tax burden.' A 50% tax increase would become a permanent part of a declining America, just as such tax increases have become a permanent part of declining European countries."
