The Real Existential Threats

On Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year 2016, the national debt is projected to reach $19.3 trillion.

With spending on the four biggest budget items – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense – rising, and GDP growing at 1 percent, future deficits will exceed this year’s projected $600 billion.

National bankruptcy, then, is among the existential threats to the republic, the prospect that we will find ourselves in the not-too-distant future in the same boat with Greece, Puerto Rico, and Illinois.

Yet, we drift toward the falls, with the issue not debated.

to pass.

The country would divide into two parties, Calhoun said. One would be the party of those who pay the taxes to the government, the other the party of those who consume the benefits of government.

The taxpayers’ party would engage in constant clashes with the party of the tax-consumers.

In 2013, the top 1 percent of Americans in income paid 38 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent of income-earners, half the nation, paid only 3 percent of all income taxes.

A question logically follows: If one belongs to that third of the nation that pays no income taxes but receives copious benefits, why would you vote for a party that will cut taxes you don’t pay, but take away benefits you do receive?

Traditional Republican platforms ask half the country to vote against its economic interests. As a long-term political strategy, that is not too promising.

During the New Deal, FDR’s aide Harold Ickes declared in what became party dogma, “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”

And so they did, and so they do. But this is a game that cannot go on forever.

For, as John Adams reminded us, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

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