Are We Going Bankrupt?

Did you ever wonder why the United States, the richest country in the world has to spend more than it makes every year and things just keep getting worse? You could listen to the politicians and they will tell you it is the fault of the old and sick, because they use too much of our money by being on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  They never mention the fact those retired people receiving Social Security paid into it their entire lives and the money they receive in not an entitlement but really their own money, but I have mentioned this many times before. Let’s talk turkey.

First of all only about 54% of all Americans paid income tax in 2011. This doesn’t take into account some monies withheld from workers’ salaries such as Social Security tax and Medicare deductions. In 2014 Forbes put out an article that stated as its title, “More Than 90% Of US Businesses Don't Pay The Corporate Income Tax.” This is tricky however, because the article went on to say many business pass the profits through to the owners who then claim them on their individual tax forms. Obviously these must be small businesses they are talking about. It is claimed this was caused by the advent of S corporations. When we talk about this type of corporation we are talking about an entity which a lot of deductions can be taken for.

The government never seems to try and take advantage of its power to help us. Take the situation with prescription drugs. It could throw its weight around and force drug companies to give us the best prices, but no it would rather allow those same companies to gouge us with the highest prices in the world for their drugs. When Ben Carson was asked about this in a debate, Ben Carson the doctor, all he could say was keep government out of it. Now we know where he would stand. It is hard for us to understand the scope of the US budget shortfall. In 2011 the government was spending $121,067 per second. It borrowed $52,162 every second. The budget for the year 2011 was $3,818,000,000,000, but wait the amount of money we spent which was borrowed that year was $1,645,000,000,000. How can any country exist very long doing this? That was 2011 and right now in 2015 things are much worse and the government has just lifted the lid off the debt ceiling this October.

We know we have been fighting wars constantly and this has eaten up a lot of money, but was it enough to put us in such a hole? One reason is the Federal Reserve Bank which is a private bank that charges us for everything even every dollar printed. It is an outrage, but they have forced their way into almost every country setting up central banks in them. There is a rumor that President Kennedy was going to do away with them and we were going to print our own money and that is why he was killed. Most of the money we owe is owed to the Federal Reserve Bank. If we did away with it a very large portion of our debt would be wiped out.

Defense budgets take a huge chunk of our budget. We need a decent defense budget, but corruption is rampant in the defense budget and an incredible 2.9 trillion dollars couldn’t be accounted for according to Donald Rumsfeld. The announcement was made on September 10, 2001. Coincidently the next day after the announcement the Pentagon was hit in the very area where the accounting computers with the records of expenditures for the Defense Department were stored and they were blown up along with many people. That was on September 11, 2001. If all the corruption was taken out of defense contracts it would go a long way to make that budget more manageable. When we talk about things which make no sense we have to mention Medicare and Medicaid. The reason I say this is we pay about 5 times more than some countries who get a much higher rating in their health care. Why is it an aspirin in a hospital cost us hundreds of dollars? You can’t really believe there is nothing we can do to fix this. If we were paying what we should for medication it would only cost 1/5 of what it does now, but rather than fix this broken system, politicians would rather blame the public for the high cost. These are the same people who looted the Social Security System then blamed the old people for there not being enough money in it.

This reminds me of a story. I remember an effort which was made by a local government to weed out corruption in school districts. They found in the first three they checked people were stealing money. They stopped their investigation because they didn’t want to have to arrest people in every school district. I think this is why government agencies are never really looked into, because there would be too many guilty parties found. An example is the VA or Veterans Administration. People died waiting to be seen by a doctor. A new director was appointed and yet no one was ever held responsible and you don’t hear about the agency very much anymore. For all we know there could be people there selling supplies and such. They should be audited and wrong doers punished.

Every government agency should be audited with the view of cutting waste and corruption. It is said the US Post Office is losing money every day and yet its revenue is growing. In 3 months it lost 1.5 billion dollars. In 2014 the Post Office made $67.8 billion dollars gross income but lost $5.5 billion. What is wrong with this picture? Why does the Post Office still have to give junk mail rates to bulk mailers and lose money on every piece? I don’t know about anyone else, but my daily mail is composed of mostly junk mail. Email accounts for most of my correspondence. Maybe it is time the Post Office did something sensible like no more special junk mail rates, freeze hiring and become a smaller service, one not customized for business anymore since there are now other ways for businesses to advertise and become a service for us.

I am sure that government agencies are the most incompetent. Private industry has always been better at running things, it is time to clean up our act and rethink the way we do things before there is nothing left to think about. Our government is on the verge of insolvency, but maybe that is what some countries or people want to happen to get us out of their way.