Rational Nation USA

by: Les Carpenter Rational Nation USA Birthplace of Independent Conservatism Liberty -vs- Tyranny The debt ceiling/deficit reduction debate/crises is concluded. The result? Our nation avoided defaulting on its obligations. A good thing. That and the Congress & President now have the green light to spend a couple trillion plus more over the next year and a half. Not a good thing. Of course the special "super commission" is supposed to come up with an additional trillion and a half in spending cuts. Cuts both the Congress and the President will have to approve or the triggers dems fear will kick in and automatic spending cuts will occur. That's the plan at this point anyway. We'll see. The forthcoming debate over how to handle the details of "the deal" will be every bit as rancorous as the debt ceiling/deficit reduction debate just concluded. Such is American politics. We can all be relatively certain given recent history that the American peo...

by: Les Carpenter Rational Nation USA Birthplace of Independent Conservatism Remember David Stockman, a former Republican representative from Michigan and the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985 during the first Reagan term? I caught the following at Memeorandum this morning. Mr. Stockman presents a case worth considering as he analyses both sides in the debt/deficit issue. IT is obvious that the nation’s desperate fiscal condition requires higher taxes on the middle class, not just the richest 2 percent. Likewise, entitlement reform requires means-testing the giant Social Security and Medicare programs, not merely squeezing the far smaller safety net in areas like Medicaid and food stamps. Unfortunately, in proposing tax increases only for the very rich, President Obama has denied the first of these fiscal truths, while Representative Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, has contradicted the second by putting the entire bu...

by: Les Carpenter Rational Nation USA Birthplace of Independent Conservatism Wonder of wonders... our inept government managed to give the American people a 38.5 billion minuscule and meaningless cut to a proposed one trillion trillion dollar budget. So, putting this aside, the next big battle will be over raising the debt ceiling. Hopefully the rational among lawmakers will hold their ground and do some serious relection and very hard bargaining. What we need to do to lower the debt ceiling. Force the Leviathan over blotted obese federal government to control it's insatiable appetite to continually go on gorging itself at the nations expense. As a nation we need to accept once again two very basic concepts. First is to understand that self reliance is a virtue and that depending on the government to take care of you is a misguided and destructive course of action. Or better put, misguided course of inaction. Second is the absolute necessity to accept we must begin living...

Judging by the race, beginning during the G.W. Bush years, to follow policies that drastically increase our National Debt and budget deficits, it would now seem to be an appropriate time to break out the champaign. Our National Debt just hit $12,031,299,186,290.07 officially at 3:00 p.m. EST November 17, 2009. History has confirmed that American economic policies, followed by administration after administration, since FDR's beloved New Deal have  resulted over time in increasing federal deficits, the national debt, and our reliance on most everything foreign. Now that's not to say foreign competition is bad, but when our country is increasingly owned or controlled by overseas economic and political  interests we as a Nation are in serious trouble. The policies of the past 76 years ain't gonna get us out of trouble by continuing to do the same things and expecting different results. Isn't that one definition of insanity...