The Debt-Sea Scrolls
by Of Thee I Sing 1776The Debt Sea, that ocean of red ink that threatens to overflow its banks and inundate every nook and cranny in America from Main Street to Wall street, is bordered on the south by the Potomac River, to the east-southeast by the Anacostia River, to the north-northeast by Prince Georges County, Maryland, to the north-northwest by Montgomery County, Maryland and to the immediate west by Georgetown and the historic 175-year-old Chesapeake-and-Ohio Canal.
The Debt-Sea Scrolls tell a story of evolving fiscal folly that could represent one of the greatest man-made disasters ever — the destruction of mankind’s most successful experiment in governance and the crippling of an economic system that produced the greatest sustained prosperity the world has ever known. The first of the Debt-Sea Scrolls was written around 80-years ago when the government believed it could spend its way out of the Great Depression with money it didn’t have…with money it didn’t even almost have. The programs (known as the “New Deal”) described in the first of the Debt-Sea Scrolls didn’t succeed in revitalizing American industry. It was The Second World War and the massive Lend-Lease program with which we became the “Arsenal for Democracy” that finally succeeded in revitalizing American Industry. By the time the war was over, so was the Great Depression. Unemployment had plummeted to below 2.0% by the time the war ended in 1945 from 14.6% in 1940, which was essentially the rate of unemployment during the early years of the depression and seven years of New Deal Keynesian prime-the-pump policies. Following the war, American industry converted from wartime to peacetime production and the rate of unemployment remained below 6.0% for over a decade and for most of the half century that followed.
We learn from the Debt-Sea Scrolls that unsustainable national debt, fueled by easy credit that required borrowers to have very little skin in the game (sound familiar?) was, more than any other factor, generally credited with igniting the economic conflagration we now know as the Great Depression. Ironically we are now, seventy years later, adding unsustainable debt (to already unsustainable debt) at a level many economists believe will seriously impede our recovery and may end any hope of returning to robust prosperity. We are, systematically, mortgaging the future of our children, their children and their children’s children as well.
Let us pause to consider the debt-spawning spending spree on which the government has embarked and proposes further to accelerate.
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
| 
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Got a Tip?