I remember when the National Debt Clock first went up. I don’t remember the actual day, and honestly, I thought it had gone up during Reagan’s 2nd term, but I was wrong. I looked it up and it actually went up on February 20th 1989, exactly a month after Reagan left office.
I’m certain my confusion was because, the entire time Reagan
was in office, all the Democrats could talk about was the national debt. And it was a big deal. The growth under
Reagan was unprecedented, rising
about 184% during his 8 years, more than double that of Nixon and Ford
combined (as a percent), 4 times that of Carter in one term, not to mention 5
times Clinton, and more than double Bush and Obama combined.
Now of course we all know why the debt ballooned so much
under Reagan. Tax cuts and the military,
especially Star Wars! Well, all of that,
but really the most important thing was: Democrats. What did Democrats have to do with
anything? Pretty much everything. Democrats, led by the liar / streetfighter /
Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, never saw a government program outside of
Defense that they wanted to cut. Well, technically, to be fair, there was
something else they didn’t spend money on… the boarder wall they promised
Reagan in 1986 in exchange for his granting amnesty for 2.7 million illegal
aliens. The illegals got amnesty, but
Reagan never got the promised wall.
And so it goes.
That first clock clocked in at $2.7 trillion. Boy, does that
feel like a long time ago! And it
was. Back then a trillion dollars
actually meant something. Today’s Debt
Clock just recently crossed the $40 trillion mark. At some point these numbers stop feeling
real. We hear things like if the
government spent $1 million a second it would take them over a year to
spend $40 trillion and other things we can’t quite wrap our heads around.
An easier way to think about it is this: In 1989 the $2.7 trillion National Debt
worked out to be about $11,500 per American. Today, at $40 trillion that number
has jumped to about $116,000 per person,
What’s worse is the pool of “Unfunded liabilities” that are
mostly Social Security and Medicare. In
1989 such liabilities sat at approximately $4 trillion, or about $17,000 per
American. Today, unfunded liabilities sit
at approximately $130 trillion, or… about $250,000 per person.
To put this in perspective, forty years ago it would have
taken the average American about a year and a half to work off all of their
“share” of the nation’s public debt.
Today, it would take five years! I thought computers and the Internet
were supposed to make things more efficient.
Those numbers are simply insane. One simply has to ask: “How the hell did we end up here?”
Well… since you’ve asked, I can tell you. We are largely here for three reasons, or
more accurately, because of three people:
Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Howard Zinn… and the tens of
millions of useful idiots who believe their ideas.
Cloward and Piven were the authors of the Cloward–Piven
strategy. At its most fundamental level the 1966 strategy is a roadmap
for destroying the United States as a free-market, capitalist society and turning
it into a “socialist” nirvana. Specifically, the goal was to collapse the
federal government by overwhelming it with welfare and redistribution obligations. Doing so, in turn, would create a permanent dependency
class that could be counted on to vote Democrat for basically forever: “If organizers can deliver millions of
dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect
that the masses will deliver their loyalty to their benefactors.”
Given that their strategy was such a big departure from most
of American history, they understood that they would need the media to help
sell the idea: “As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass
media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and
injustices of welfare.”
Basically Cloward & Piven wanted to drive poor people
from across America into her major cities, access public services, spark
anarchy and watch as the various levels of government became overwhelmed and
dysfunctional and reached out to the federal government for help. Eventually Capitalism would be obliterated
and the central government would control everything and wealth would be
distributed evenly.
So, they had a blueprint (which Democrats have been
following for 60 years) and a complicit media, but that wasn’t enough. It takes
a lot of work and a long time to convince people who grew up in a free and
prosperous nation that somehow the driver of that prosperity is evil…
It would be much easier to teach that lesson to young people
and let them grow up knowing it.
Fortunately, a fellow traveler – and fellow professor at Boston
University with Piven – Howard Zinn – stepped up to the plate. In 1980 he published A People's History of
the United States, possibly the most cancerous history of America that’s
ever been written. For him, America is a
history driven by a tyranny of whites over everyone else, men over women and
rich over poor. Practically everything,
from her founding documents up to the middle of the 20th century was designed
to either subjugate minorities, women and the poor or maintain that reality. For
him, America is a nation created by, controlled by and controlled for white elites,
at the expense of everyone else.
His book has sold millions of copies commercially and its
used by almost 200,000 teachers around the country and fully a quarter of high
school history teachers! It’s no
surprise that less
than half of young people are proud to be Americans.
Between Cloward, Piven and Zinn, they created the victimization
/ government largesse ecosystem that we see playing itself out in America
today. That has been the Democrat party for the last 60 years, and it worked
exactly as they suggested it would, a mass of dependent voters who march to
whatever tune the Democrat party is playing, and bankrupting America along the
way.
At some point the bill comes due. America has third world
levels of debt and the reality is, it can’t go on forever. This year alone the federal government will
spend in the ballpark of 25% more than it brings in… and it’s been going on
like that for almost a decade.
As an aside, if you want to refresh your American history or teach your kids what America is really all about, I recommend Paul Johnson’s History of the American People and Harold Evans’ They Made America. Both written by Brits who were not poisoned by America’s leftist media and academia, they are easily two of the best books on American history you will ever read.
