Dakota Beacon

“Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.”
-Ezra Pound

“Buy what thou hast no Need of and ere long thou shalt sell thy Necessaries.”
-Benjamin Franklin


The American people should be insulted by the current discussion of the effects of raising the debt ceiling. On the one hand we have those in favor of raising it telling us that this equates with paying our creditors and not raising it equates with defaulting on our nation’s debt.  On the other is the argument that allowing any increase in our debt will destroy our country.  Let’s be clear about this.  No one is talking about defaulting on our debt at this point. 

Those who advocate raising the debt ceiling are not calling for any substantial cuts in government spending - “business as usual” in Washington.  Their position is that failure to increase the debt ceiling will cause us to fail to pay our military and Social Security and Medicare recipients.  Ergo, we need to raise the debt ceiling because we can’t fail them.  Honesty requires that we clarify this.  Those who wish to raise the debt ceiling offer no idea as to where the money will be found or created.  This means that we would have to print more dollar bills, in effect.  Everyone knows what that means.  It means that the loaf of bread we pay $2 for today will go up in price.  Rapidly.  We will pay $5 and then $6 and then $8 and we will be able to buy less bread.  Who will find this most difficult?  The bakeries will raise prices so that they can continue to bake the bread, while paying more for ingredients, higher employee costs (like health insurance increases) and exponentially more for the energy to heat the ovens.  But the military and the recipients of Medicare and Social Security do not have this option.  They are on a fixed income.  So they will eat less bread.  They will also get less medical care. Will they heat their homes?  We shall see.

The elitists among us like to use attractive euphemisms like “quantitative easing”, as in “QE, QE2 and now QE3” (technical terms for “good old inflation”, “super inflation” and “super-duper inflation”, leading to hyperinflation – look up “Zimbabwe”).  When you hear these “technical terms”, just translate them. They all refer to the Xerox machine in the White House basement.

There is no pretty way to describe this.  The people left with the greatest pain in this scenario are exactly those whom the big spenders and the debt ceiling raisers are using as shields for their spending sprees– the elderly and the military.  We are supposed to show our concern for these fixed income people, retirees and military personnel, by raising the debt ceiling.  Let’s just speak plainly. Our national house is on fire here.  We can’t allow the spenders to blackmail us with images of pitiful seniors and marooned servicemen, because the worst thing we can do to them is send them checks based on a worthless currency.

Simply stated, raising the debt ceiling = devaluing the dollar. Those checks might carry the same dollar figure.  But the dollar, like any other paper or electronic currency, has no value in and of itself.  A dollar, like a seashell or a pile of beans in an ancient culture, is nothing but a means of exchange.  It’s “value” depends entirely upon what you, the holder, can exchange it for in the market place.  If you can buy a loaf of bread for two of them today but need four of them to buy the same loaf tomorrow, you have less tomorrow than today, even though the “dollar” amount on your check does not change.  The idea being expounded by the charlatans who wish to raise our debt ceiling as a means to push the problem of our over spending and outrageous debt farther down the road for the next president or Congress  - and our grandchildren - to worry about, is but a cruel deception being played on our military families and our seniors. 

Increasing taxes will destroy what is left of our private sector economy – which, in turn, is what powers our government.  The bottom line is we can’t keep spending, we can’t make it “all better” by raising our debt ceiling and cranking out more dollar bills.  This is fraud.  We can’t just take more out of our real economy through taxation. We can’t and won’t default on our debt.  We have only one solution and that is to stop the spending while giving the private sector every possible incentive to regenerate itself – grow the American economy - and that through legitimate means.

But what are we seeing instead?  While Congress goes head to head with the President over the budget, the EPA is busy imposing lethal conditions on our energy producing plants and tying the hands of business and industry.  What does the reasonable person think will happen when, as projected, our energy costs increase by $184 billion in the next year?  Just what effect will this have on economic recovery?  Slow it a bit, maybe?  And all the while we are paying a lot of money for this “service”.   (Budget for the EPA for FY 2010: $10,297,864,000, with 17,278 employees.  With all this new “work” to do we can only expect this to go up.  Of COURSE we must raise the debt ceiling!!!  How else can we continue the work of destroying our economy?)

When our fears are addressed by arguments that we are in “recovery” we need to realize that this is another heartless deception.  The books are cooked by “balancing” our decrease in buying power in the market place and our record unemployment with the big “plus”: the evidence that our housing market is crashing.  That fixes everything!  So the man who has lost his business or his job can now console himself that he is upside down in his mortgage and about to lose his one investment – his home.  His loaf of bread is twice as expensive, but, hey, his home is worth half as much!  It all balances!  This doesn’t sound like recovery to most of us.  The truth is we are not in any kind of a “recovery” and won’t likely be any time soon.  It will take longer for every hike we see in the cost of energy, for every government bureaucrat micromanaging our state, local and personal affairs, for every program bought into by Congress, for every bailout of defunct crony businesses, for every borrowed dollar we send to Somalia in “foreign aid”, for every unnecessary war in which we become embroiled.  It is almost insulting to have to say or write or hear these things – they are self-evident.  We all know what is happening.

We can’t let our spend-till-we-drop Congress and Executive get away with this.  We can’t let them tell us we need to facilitate more spending “for our military and Social Security and Medicare recipients”.  It doesn’t fly.  We’re not children. This cynical shell game is over. Americans are ready to take our country back from the wastrels and bureaucrats we were told we couldn’t live without.  It’s time to just say no – no to more spending and no to raising the debt ceiling to accommodate it. And we must get away from fiat currency.  We need to return to money that is based on reality.  It’s time to fully audit the Fed  - give it a “stress test” - and then begin the process of eliminating it.

Sally Morris is a member of Americans for Conservative Government and the Executive Committee of the Valley Tea Party Conservative Coalition.