The Shutdown is About Spending, Not a Wall

The shutdown is not the result of a border wall or no border wall. It is the result of decades' worth of reckless government spending and (thankfully!) appropriations laws that have sunset clauses in them and force Congress to reconvene and re-approve spending. If people lament the government shutdown, there's a simple solution to preventing one in the future: tell their congressperson to CUT SPENDING.

We can grieve with those who are going without pay right now.

We can show them some kindness and grace when they seek assistance.

But what we cannot do is acquiesce to the federal government's dangerous, out-of-control spending. Our national debt sits at just under $22,000,000,000,000 and continues to climb. The average taxpayer debt is a whopping $179,500, over double or even three times the median annual income for a family of four, depending on which measure you use. One recently elected congresswoman even proposes an additional $40,000,000,000,000 (40 TRILLION) in federal spending to sprinkle the magic fairy dust known as "free healthcare" for all. This is sheer madness!

Taken at 3:36 PM CT, January 23, 2019

We've grown up all our lives hearing that "money doesn't grow on trees", but because the USD is a fiat currency backed by nothing but the federal government's IOUs, it can print bills at the Treasury as if money does grow on trees. "Monetizing debt", as the printing and circulation of many new bills is called, does not solve the problem of excessive debt and creates more problems by inflating the value of the currency so that it becomes worth less. Think Zimbabwe's introduction of 10 and 100 Trillion dollar notes.

Another version of this kind of TOP. MEN. thinking that we're so blessed to have in Washington results in "quantitative easing", which is a fancy way of saying stimulus spending. The key, as you'll notice, is that the word spending is in the proposed solution, so it becomes rather obvious that they don't seek to address the $22 trillion dollar elephant in the room. Besides government bailouts of failing companies and industries, stimulus spending can take the form of direct transfers of wealth from one group to another. But every time, the government is borrowing money from the future to pay for things now.

I've made the mistake of thinking I could borrow my way out of debt. "Well, maybe if I refinance these credit cards onto a new credit card I can tackle the debt more efficiently..." But the root problem was my out-of-control spending. By God's grace, my wife and I have cut our expenses drastically and in the last 22 months have paid off over $100,000 in debt (largely my law school loans). And we've done this while maintaining charitable giving to our church and elsewhere at over 10% of our budget! It's not out of the realm of possibility to cut spending, but it does require sacrifice and patience.

"But the government is not like a family!" protest the Keynesian dolts. "Different measures are necessary to correct this particular issue!"

Well, I agree that the government is not like a family. For starters, it is not the government's role to provide parental guidance on issues of what to eat, what to wear, or where we can go. Nor is it the government's responsibility to provide food, shelter, and education for its citizens. Perhaps if the American family began to do more of those things for itself, there would be less demand for the government to step into such a role.

But I will vehemently disagree with the mindset that what works for individual families cannot work for a government. Contrary to popular opinion at the time, following the 2008 recession Iceland bucked all "too big to fail" theories and cut spending in order to address many of its systemic economic issues. 10 years later, Iceland has recovered nicely, while countries like Greece that continued their spending sprees have not even begun to recover. There was a bit of stimulus spending in Iceland, so it's far from the ideal in my opinion; but it's no coincidence that cutting spending and actually tackling its foreign debt head on has paid huge dividends for the small island nation.

A final note regarding President Trump's tax cuts from last year: The chattering class hasn't stopped talking about how the tax cuts have added to the deficit. There's nothing inherently wrong with tax cuts, though, which is nothing more than returning to the people the wealth that was generated by and belongs to them. The deficit problem stems from failing to cut spending to correspond with the reduction in tax revenue. This is what so many people miss, largely because they do not see wealth as a creation of the private sector but as something that belongs to Uncle Sam (and by extension as members of a privileged class of insiders, them).

So please stop buying what the beltway media, Congress, and the Trump administration are selling: this shutdown is not about a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. That's a convenient bargaining chip to gin up support among voter bases, but neither party nor their lapdogs in the media could care less what happens at the border if the coffers are reopened. If you have any question about the oligarchic collusion between the parties, read Walter Karp's eye-opening book Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America. It's to their benefit for us to keep fighting each other over a border wall, a "dust-up that wasn't" outside the Lincoln Memorial, or any number of other culture clashes, so that behind the scenes they can continue to bankroll the military industrial complex, insurance companies, and other special industries.