printThe national debt is reason enough for the impeachment of W. Today, as The Christian Science Monitor reports, it totals $8.3 trillion. Democrats are quite right to tar “Bush as the president who squandered the Clinton-era track record of fiscal responsibility.” As our national debt stands, we would not be admitted into the company of socialists: The European Union. The EU “expects member nations to hold deficits below 60 percent of GDP.”
The US doesn’t qualify.
The evidence goes to show that government growth as a share of GDP coincides with a decline in GDP growth. Governments in high-income developed economies have now been steadily accreting for decades. The decline in prosperity or in real growth rates in these nations has been concomitant: As government share of the GDP rises, so has GDP in the OECD nations been declining. ‘A 10 percent increase in government expenditure as a share of GDP results in a 1 percent point reduction in GDP growth.’
If they do nothing else, Americans should switch off Fox News and open Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson (the first makes you too dumb to comprehend the last). There they will learn that there is no free lunch. To finance his Welfare and Warfare wantonness, Bush calls on the Federal Reserve and the printing press to print money. Inflation is an increase in the money supply. This practice—inflation—raises prices and depreciates the value of the currency. The new money will generate price hikes throughout the economy. The endemic price hikes and economic distortions that follow are a byproduct of this legalized counterfeiting.
And that invariably means poorer people, not politicians—Americans should also know that the parasites in charge, the ones they give their unremitting support to, will always get richer; you and I poorer.
Why? The new money reaches the politically connected first. They get fat checks well before the general price increases caused by all the new money affect their purchasing power. Corporate cronies like Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction arm of Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Bechtel Corporation are good examples of war profiteers who’ll benefit first from counterfeit coinage.
By the time you and I, politically unconnected suckers that we are, experience a meager rise in money income, rising prices will have obliterated the tiny gain.
Further reading: Government Growth Impoverishes, Blame Government for the Economic Bust, Wartime Socialism, and Deficit Disorders.