I am tired of hearing all the excuses that Congressional representatives are giving the American people. In 2000 the U.S. was operating with a surplus and had plenty of money to conduct business with extra to spare. In 2002 the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan as a response to the attack on the U.S. in 9/11/2001 by the Bin Laden terrorists group. During that time the laws governing federal contracts were bypassed so that less qualifying companies demanding higher prices could be awarded contracts. There were conflicts of interest in awarding such contracts that were overlooked. The State Department paid outrageous prices for products by companies eager to make a profit at taxpayers’ expense. In some cases, the military and Afghanistan war were being blamed for costs that were being redirected elsewhere. One might say there were too many hands in the tax account stealing taxes away from the nation and blaming it on something else with no one to monitor it. Then the American people were told a war in Iraq was necessary, it would be short lived and it and the Iraqi reconstruction paid for by profits from Iraqi oil. The war wasn’t short lived and wasn’t paid for by Iraqi oil, instead there were billions of dollars designated to the war efforts, medical and rehabilitation costs to treat injured soldiers, and death benefits and funeral costs for deceased military soldiers and their families. Both wars were very expensive and the U.S. is still paying the price for them. Through all of this government employees saw their wages and annual cost of living increases, increase to higher levels than ever before while salaries in the private sector were going down or at least not keeping up with cost of living increases. Congress was awarding grants and money to special interest groups for limited number of jobs to specific people while unemployment rose to all time highs. Wasteful spending by government agencies, paying outrageous price tags for items that could be bought on the open market for a fraction of what the government agencies were paying are just a few of examples of wasteful spending. The federal government should put a freeze on government hiring and cost of living increases like they did under the Reagan administration, reclassify all positions and possibly lower their current pay rate, put a ceiling on how much each agency can spend on each item it buys then conduct annual audits to verify amounts, return back to the old method of awarding contracts to the most qualified bidder at the lowest price, reduce the amounts of money and grants awarded annually to special interest groups until the deficit is reduced, create a special program for disability claims and recipients so it can be closely monitored for fraud and have it paid from taxes, rewrite the regulations about what constitutes disability and put restrictions on them, reduce the amount of money given to foreign countries-if the U.S. can’t pay its debts then it can’t give money away to other countries, keep all agencies open but reduce the amounts given to them, put stricter hiring requirements on new applicants are just a few suggestions reducing the deficit. If one wants to get real ugly about it, eliminate Medicaid, free medical to Native Americans, and government health insurance and put them under Obama’s affordable healthcare insurance plan. If the above suggestions seem extreme to some, what is going to happen if the U.S. goes into default? Per en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_bankruptcy A sovereign government, by definition, controls its own affairs, it cannot be obliged to pay back its debt. Nonetheless, governments may face severe pressure from lending countries. In the most extreme cases, a creditor nation may declare war on a debtor nation for failing to pay back debt, in order to enforce creditor’s rights. For an example, Britain routinely invaded countries that failed to repay foreign debts, invading Egypt in 1882. Other examples includes the United States “gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela in the mid-1890s and the United States occupation of Haiti beginning in 1915. A government which defaults may also be excluded from further credit and some of its overseas assets may be seized, and it may face political pressure from its own domestic bondholders to pay back its debt. Therefore governments rarely default on the entire value of their debt, instead, they often enter into negotiations with their bondholders to agree on a delay or partial reduction of their debt payments, which is often called a debt restructuring or “haircut”. Some economists have argued that, in the case of acute insolvency cases, it can be advisable for regulators and supranational lenders to preemptively engineer the orderly restructuring of a nation’s public debt-also called “orderly default” or “controlled default” in the case of Greece, these experts generally believe that a delay in organizing an orderly default would hurt the rest of Europe even more. The International Monetary Fund often assists in sovereign debt restructurings. To ensure that funds will be available to pay the remaining part of the sovereign debt, it often makes its loans conditional on austerity measures within the country, such as tax increases or reductions in pubic sector jobs and services. A recent example is the Greek bailout agreement of May 2010. Russia experienced a sovereign default. The situation became so dire that the Russian leader had to borrow large sums of money from Russian banks and financial institutions to feed the Russian people. The banks and financial institutions put large conditions on the loans which used Russian land, minerals, and other types of wealth as collateral. That is why in Russia today only a hand full of people own all the land and wealth in Russia and everyone else is poor and struggling. Do we want that to happen in the U.S. too. The U.S. has borrowed large sums of money as well as spent all the taxpayers’ dollars, and probably all the gold in Fort Knox on what? Perhaps all those FEMA camps that look like prisons popping up everywhere and NATO and Russian troops being trained in the U.S. for riot control have legitimate purposes. Perhaps this default isn’t by mistake but instead a conspiracy to undermined the American people and bring the U.S. under control of a foreign country? Americans should seriously consider what the Congressional representatives are doing in Washington and be more cautious on who they elect to represent them. Going to war in Syria would have been a very serious mistake.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 05:56:32 +0000
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