What happens when the creditors come calling?

For more than seventy years, the United States government has been spending like a drunken sailor. Somewhere along the way, America acquired a proverbial charge card and a seemingly unlimited credit line with which to spend. And while there have been endless possibilities to what she could buy, the reality is that her credit line is not so infinite. So this begs one, big question that I think Uncle Sam must answer: What happens when our creditors come calling?
Indeed, what will the United States of America do when China, Saudi Arabia and other countries from which we have been borrowing money finally decide that we’ve reached the end of our credit? What happens when the loans are called? How will America pay her bill with a growing nine trillion dollar debt?
Will China, the Middle East and Europe begin to divide up our vital interests around the world? Will these creditors claim rights to every square inch of real estate in the United States? Will our spending spell the end of our sovereignty, which shall be summarily dissolved once the creditors have claimed their collateral?
So many questions and too precious little time left to answer them all.
Something needs to be done now to stop the spending and our mounting debt.
There are those who say ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will allow us to pay down the debt faster than at the rate we are currently spending. They only have half a point. While the federal government is spending billions of dollars to fund the wars in the Middle East, it is also spending billions more on the rest of its pork infrastructure—not the least of which are social programs paying out huge gobs of mullah in the form of benefits and handouts to its “needy” citizens.
Liberals have claimed for years that disarming our country and adopting a foreign policy of daisies in the rifles would save us from a national debt. But they conveniently ignore all of the money spent on domestic policy, such as social and human services, public health, the humanities and the arts, the environment, science and many other subjects in the name of compassion. This type of spending is a cornerstone of liberal advocacy and has gone largely unchecked since the Great Depression.
In the 1980s, spending under President Ronald Reagan skyrocketed because of all the extra pork and Congressional earmarks attached to his bills, which were designed to strengthen the military at the height of the Cold War. So while a bill may have left Reagan’s desk to build a few B-1 Bombers, the same bill would return weighted down heavily with additional monies earmarked for welfare or the National Endowment for the Arts. This happened more often than not because President Reagan was dealing with a liberal democratic Congress, the majority of whom subscribed to former President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” vision.
Reagan, meanwhile, realized that the only way to get his “Star Wars” and other Cold War military programs off the ground was to compromise with Congress. As a result, Reagan affixed his signature to many an overweight bill returned to his desk. And consequently, he absorbed the lion’s share of the blame for the national debt accrued during his tenure in office.
There was a period of military peace in the 1990s. Saddam Hussein had been driven out of Kuwait and corralled within his own borders. The Soviet Union collapsed. Communism had retreated back into the shadows. China was just beginning to compete with us in the global economy, but still retained its Third World, pre-nuclear status. And Islamic terrorism was considered to be a mere nuisance to us, rather than a formidable and dangerous enemy.
Combine these events with a conservative Congress voted to power in 1994 and a liberal democratic president forced to act more conservative to win re-election, then it’s no wonder that spending was significantly reduced and our country ended up with a revenue surplus by the end of the decade.
Unfortunately, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed everything. While America was enjoying a deficit surplus, her vigilance suffered and she fell asleep. It took a horrific event like 9/11/01 to wake her up. But the cost of America’s complacency was a war she knew she had to win for the sake of her own survival.
Now six and a half years later, we have a nine trillion dollar debt, in large part due to the “War on Terror” that we were compelled to wage courtesy of religious fanatics obsessed with our destruction. Further complicating matters was an increasingly more liberal republican Congress and a president who identified himself as a “compassionate” conservative who did nothing to slow or stop the amount of domestic spending our government has indulged in for decades.
Moreover, there was NAFTA and other global economic agreements signed into law during the 1990s. The intention of these policies was to foster free trade with other countries, but the unintended consequences of which have meant manufacturing and production jobs outsourced overseas. Now, China has become more than just an economic partner to the United States; it is necessary to keep our economy going.
Not only are we beholden to China for furnishing us with the goods we consume on a daily basis, but we have grown even more dependent on the Middle East for oil.
In fact, our dependence on foreign oil has come back to bite us big time ever since we started to restrict the exploration and development of our own petroleum products with prohibitive environmental laws, beginning some 30 years ago.
Now, we cry every time OPEC, Venezuela and other oil-producing nations put the squeeze on their supply to drive up our price per barrel. They grab us by the balls and we sing soprano for their amusement.
In recent years, we have looked to the wealth of the Middle East and China from which to borrow money—a frightening prospect, considering that these countries don’t exactly hold us in the highest regard. In fact, the United States of America has literally been the envy of the rest of the world since World War I. Other countries have been jealous of America for years. Now, some of them have found a way to get what we have: By digging into our back pocket. Because good, old Uncle Sam can’t contain his compassion or compulsive spending, he has resorted to dealing with loan sharks who are wringing their hands in delight.
The bottom line here is that while military spending has certainly contributed to our monstrous debt, so has our domestic spending habits, our trade policies, the global economy and our own idiot laws that put the handcuffs on our self-sufficiency. The result has been a growing dependence on other countries to lend us money that we turn around and spend faster than we can secure the loan.
I agree that an end to war would reduce our spending significantly. So let’s go ahead and win it already. Why are we playing patty-cake with the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of kicking them to kingdom come? We unleashed the fury of our military when we first invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq; but for some reason, we pulled our punches and let the enemy fight back. Consequently, the wars have lasted five years instead of five months as perhaps they could have. But what we should not do is pull out entirely, leaving our military’s business unfinished. To cut and run would be worse than staying, because then we will no longer be on offense and instead will end up waiting on defense with baited breath here at home for the next terrorist attack. Furthermore, cutting and running from the Middle East would make the investments already made there in vain.
I wouldn’t want to look a war veteran in the eye and have to explain to them that their efforts over there were for nothing.
Besides winning the war, let’s tighten our belts here at home, too. Start by making serious spending cuts to areas of our government not essential to the functions of Congress as defined in the Constitution. That would mean cuts to probably 95 percent of the federal budget.
Finally, we ought to insist that Congress put an immediate and permanent freeze on the salary increases it has voted for itself over the years. I’ll go even further than this and demand that Congress also roll back its salaries and benefits to those more comparable to our own.
But I doubt the boys on the hill will agree to such a demand on the basis that it is “Constitutionally essential” to the operation of government. That would figure. They’ll slash benefits to the needy before they cut their own perks.
All I know is, we had better do something soon before our creditors call their loans. Then we’ll all be working for the Chinese and the Saudis.
Scary. Very scary.