Fiscal responsibility

David Walker has been warning the country about our unsustainable fiscal path for over a decade.

• Since August 2007 the National Debt has increased from $8.9 trillion to $14.6 trillion, a 64% increase in four years.
• We’ve increased our cumulative expenditure on our wars of choice in the Middle East to $1.3 trillion since 2001.
• Our annual military spending rose from $653 billion in 2007 to the current $966 billion, a 48% increase in four years.
• Federal government transfers for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment, Veterans, Food Stamps, and Welfare increased from $1.7 trillion in 2007 to the current level of $2.3 trillion, a 35% increase in four years

David Walker, the former head of the GAO from 1998 until 2008, compared the U.S. Empire to the Roman Empire “There are striking similarities between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

But why should we expect the government to show fiscal irresponsibility when the people continue to demand benefits from a bankrupt system. Can we look to the central government for any benefit at all as long as we know they can only provide those benefits by taking from the future of our children, both born and unborn?

While Edward Gibbon explained in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that the collapse was due to the corruption of the leaders but the power they were given by the greed and apathy of the people and the over extension of its dept through a growing welfare state which granted the people public gratuities that undermined their own character. Gibbons understood that it was the decay of virtues and values amongst the people that made the return path so difficult.

Also, their constant and continued wars eroded the treasury and burdened the people. These two elements drove Rome to its self-destruction.

While Gibbon knew that government policies aligned society, he concluded there were five marks of the Roman decaying found in the practice of their culture by the people themselves:

1. Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth. Americans measure wealth and success on how much they have, although they are in debt beyond their means to pay. Thanks to the greed and centralized power of the socialist state.

2. Obsession with sex and perversions of sex. This is due to idleness, and the perversion of the natural use of sex to produce a family. Families are no longer the mainstay of social welfare because they and your natural fathers have been replaced by a substitute father, the socialist state.

3. Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original. This is really a part of that calling good evil and evil good syndrome when the normal drive to honor and care for one another is strangled by socialism.

4. Widening disparity between very rich and very poor. First, the middle class is destroyed in a socialist state. The rich maintain their position of power until the rich and poor are devastated in their corrupt state.

5. Increased demand to live off the state. This of course remains the passion of the selfish socialist, addicted to benefits like a meth addict. They cannot exercise a righteous heart, and though the government is bankrupt and must borrow from the future children, people still make no provision for an alternate system and continue to go the way that Polybius believed all democracies go.

"The masses continue with an appetite for benefits and the habit of receiving them by way of a rule of force and violence. The people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others... institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch.”

So the solution is not to get government to change or fight the greed and sloth of democracy but it is to learn to provide the benefits of society by loving your neighbor as your self. Abram, Moses and Jesus all did it that way and set millions free.

The real revolution will come when people individually choose to stop coveting their neighbor's goods through Benefactors who exercise authority one over the other, and then begin to gather together in meaningful Networks of charity that take care of each other and the deserving needy of society by free will offerings.