“The Biggest Threat We Have to Our National Security Is Our Debt”
By Emily Skarbek • Tuesday July 6, 2010 9:33 AM PDT • 3 Comments
Says Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen notes that within two years the annual interest on the debt will be almost as much as the bloated annual Department of Defense Budget of $700 billion. Well said. Even better if Mullen would have pointed out that the debt is only a noticeable symptom of the real threat posed by the expanding size and scope of federal government.
Why not appease the far left (ending the war) while simultaneously enacting policy advocated by the far right (cutting federal expenditures and reducing the debt obligation)? Ah, if only interest group politics operated the same way they do in my constrained day-dreams.
Tags: Bailouts, Budget and Tax Policy, Defense, Economics, Federal Reserve, Government subsidies, Money and Banking 
Future interest rates are a big unknown, and those rates have almost nowhere to go but up. So the $700 billion estimate of future interest costs may turn out too low.
Warren Gibson | Jul 7, 2010 | Reply
“The borrower is slave to the lender.”
Bankruptcy protection affords a limit to the slavery of debt for the individual, but for nations (governments) there is no protection but the maintenance of a military that can deter the lenders’ collection agents, other nations’ armies.
The U.S. has no real need to go into debt. The U.S.’ power to tax is unlimited. The classes of taxation are limited, but the degree of taxation within those classifications is not.
What is the problem with raising a revenue by taxation rather than by borrowing, which cannot ever be repaid, but constitutes a continual bleeding of the people taxed?
The practice of moneylending at usury (“interest”) is condemned by the Bible, and has been condemned by many writers over the ages. When money is created (fantasized) from nothing, it cannot be repaid, for even if the entire principal is returned to the lender, the usury remains to be paid. The lenders do not want the principal back, anyway. They want to keep it out, gathering the usury. You can see this in their practices: as fast as payments (principal and usury) come in, they are lent back out, less expenses, which for large moneylenders is minimal compared tot he volume of money lent.
“Usury” came to have such an opprobrious meaning that the milder term “interest” was substituted. In the Hebrew, the word translated “usury” in older English Bibles and “interest” in recent ones means “the bite of a poisonous serpent.”
Al Grayson | Jul 8, 2010 | Reply