Recession? We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!

In 2004, the estimated future liability for all financial guarantees to U.S. citizens by all levels of government was - get ready for this - 53 TRILLION DOLLARS. That's not a typo, and it's not a joke. The liability is also totally unfunded - the money necessary to pay for it does not yet exist.

When all benefits for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and the Prescription Drug Benefit, and all government funded pensions, are added together and projected for all citizens who are currently alive, the staggering amount of liability equals almost 4 times the entire US GDP.

In fact, the current liability is more than the total value of all goods and services created for the entire world!! So if every living person devoted an entire year's work to nothing but paying toward the United States' financial promises to its own people, we would still be short on the bill.

That's astonishing. But that's not all. The $53 (now $57) Trillion represents the value in today's dollars, not future dollars, which is how it will be paid out. The true cost of this liability is closer to $100 TRILLION when adjusted for the future value of the dollar over the term of payout.

Ok, the good news is that the Senate has just discovered $65 million in waste and fraud in the Medicare system, so let's see, that only leaves about $100 TRILLION!!!

You'll remember that George Bush tried to tackle part of the problem in 2005 when he proposed to overhaul Social Security, but no, we couldn't have that! Even though there was no risk to current beneficiaries, the Democrats waged a national campaign, complete with misinformation and fear-mongering among the elderly to defeat it. Sound familiar?

Here's the insidious part: All these programs, with the exception of Social Security, were created by the very people who stand to benefit from them, namely the so-called "Greatest Generation", a self-administered title, and their corrupt, entitlement-brained baby-boomer kids. These two generations absolutely lined their nest own eggs in gold at the expense of every other American who will ever live. Think about that - the people who paid in the least have the most to gain, and the looming insolvency of the whole shitpiece assures that future generations will either get nothing or see their own tax burdens doubled or tripled to pay for it. Either way we lose out, to the tune of more than a million dollars of lost income during our lifetimes.

What could you do with million dollars? Probably a lot, unless you're the government, in which case you sneeze it away. Think of it like this - how often do you count or keep track of pennies anymore? Never. Well, a million dollars is a like a penny to a US Senator or the president. It's meaningless, and that's how they treat it. 65 cents will buy me a can of Coke, and the Medicare fraud is like a can of Coke to the government - it takes about 5 minutes and it's gone.

Time to predict the future:
1. This will start to come to a head during 2012, Bara Bama's reelection year. If he manages to con the nation into believeing he has the best solution, all taxes on every working American will be doubled during his second term.
2. If a competent conservative is elected to the White House, along with a conservative congress, we still only have a puncher's chance at turning things around since all the clout will reside within the age groups that stand to get the benefits. The best we can hope for is a hard age cap on all government benefits that will limit the inevitable tax hikes. For example, if the cap is placed at anyone currently 50 years or older. That means the rest of us get stuck with the bill and get nothing, but at least the country as a whole still has a future.
3. Due to the current Democrat regime, out of control spending and debt issuance causes foreign lenders to balk kat future American debt risk. The US government can no longer print money without inflationary affects and the dollar crashes. Either the government immediately raises all taxes to cover the continued deficit spending and benefit payouts, which will almost certainly cause the economy to collapse, or all benefits are immediately cancelled. The government can do this simply by enacting new law.

I think the last option, as catastrophic as that may seem to the "Greatest" degeneration and the Boomer Babies, is actually the best possible outcome. It will take an economic crisis unprecedented in US history and not seen since Germany after Versailles to make it happen, and then only if we have courageous enough leadership to make it happen.

There's one more possibility, of course. That's when policitans do nothing, the economy collapses, and a liberal government federalizes all the nation's assets. It's not so far-fetched. FDR tried it in 1933 and to some extent succeeded, but the Great Depression will seem like a misplaced credit card bill compared to the inevitable chaos when the big bill comes due. Then it's Welcome to Communism!