America the Bankrupt

The economy, regardless of the what the Wall street cheerleaders on CNBC parrot, is NOT BOOMING. We will have to raise taxes, and soon. We need to repeal every single Tax cut that Bush has instituted in a time of war- to help pay for that war's effect on our federal deficit. If you are one of the many affluent who have enjoyed the tax cuts, that's all well and good, but the party is over-

It's time for a little "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The following article explains more about how the country is doing, financially.

From the AP, Matt Crenson: GAO chief warns economic Disaster looms

EXCERPT:

David M. Walker sure talks like he’s running for office. “This is about the future of our country, our kids and our grandkids,” the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin’s historic Driskill Hotel. “We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed.”

But Walker doesn’t want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.

Basically, that makes Walker the nation’s accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief’s professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it’s time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.

From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America’s political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.

What they don’t talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.

There’s a good reason politicians don’t like to talk about the nation’s long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs, and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.(...)

Walker doesn’t want to make balancing the government’s books sexy – he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the “demographic tsunami” that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operations of the U.S. government. He’s dubbed his campaign the fiscal wake-up tour.

To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he’s accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank.

Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation.

A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.

And every year that nothing is done, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

The Clinton years helped offset the issue that Ross Perot crowed about in the early 90's. But with the inscrutable tax cuts and the ultra liberal spending habits of President Bush, our country is broke again. No conservative in his right mind wants the U.S. to be beholden to China to keep us afloat forever.

It is time to stop money like there is no tomorrow. It is time for some real conservatorship of the United States and some real Fiscal conservatism to be applied. Taxes must be raised. And sorry, not only for the rich... Social Security is one of the few social entitlement plans that currently works:

Social Security currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.

But, to KEEP it working, we will need to raise the payroll tax percentage a notch, across the board. It will not take much of a bump, but a little bump nonetheless. We are all in the same boat in the end as Americans. Rich or Poor, we will all suffer if we don't pre-emptively strike in order to save the economy and STILL retain our necessary programs for the elderly. Our nation has been held by a freely spending buffoon whose policies have done more to hurt our country in six short years than any other President in the last 100 years. It's time to buckle down, and sacrifice a bit- on all levels- to save our country.