Runaway federal spending good for special interests, bad for the rest of us
Posted in Liberty Points by R Lee Wrights on July 31st, 2010 by Brian Irving
“Over the past few years, U.S. government debt held by the public has grown rapidly - to the point that, compared with the total output of the economy, it is now higher than it has ever been except during the period around World War II.”
That’s the chilling opening line of a brief recently released by the Congressional Budget Office. The non-partisan CBO warns that without significant policy reforms “growing budget deficits will cause debt to rise to unsupportable levels.”
By 2020, they predict the national debut will be 90 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Things will get worse, the brief concludes, when “the growing imbalance between revenues and non-interest spending, combined with the spiraling cost of interest payments, [will] swiftly push federal debt to unsustainable levels.”
Meanwhile, the White House Office of Management and Budget reports that fiscal year federal spending was 24.7 percent of GDP in 2009, is expected to be 24.6 percent this year and rise to 25.1 percent in 2011.
What a difference a year makes. It’s amazing what drastic changes can transpire over such a relatively short span of time. It is astounding how quickly a basically peaceable people can be led down the road to War.
When the politicians violate the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act or some other guaranteed-to-bring-peace-and-security-to-the-world scheme, they always reassure us by saying:
The War in Afghanistan has dragged on for almost nine years. 
Some of you know that I used to work in the news media. Maybe it’s that insider viewpoint that makes it especially disgusting to me when I see the state of journalism-and I use the term loosely-today.
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? … See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
This is something written for Praxis for the People, briefly a neat Green zine from Asheville NC, five years ago this month:
I. I was born free. No government can sanction my freedom, or take it away.
Plunging government revenues may have the unintended consequence - so far as tax-and-spend (and spend some more) public officials are concerned - of reminding people that we are ultimately responsible for our own safety.
