Our current national debt is at 17.5 trillion dollars which equates to around $55,000 per every man, woman, and child in the United States which is an absolutely staggering sum of money that is owed by the citizens of this country. But it gets much worse, as there are unfunded off-balance sheet liabilities which have not been factored into our true federal deficit for such items as government-guaranteed mortgages, government-guaranteed student loans, FDIC guarantees, social security guarantees, Medicare guarantees, and other trust funds guarantees, in which these off-balance sheet liabilities may total up to as much as 70 trillion dollars as estimated by economist James Hamilton of UCSD. As bad as that is, it's shocking that our national debt did not first cross the 1 trillion dollar mark until 1982, so in the last thirty years, this government has run up a stunning and unprecedented deficit which is left for future generations to pay for. This is both morally and fiscally wrong.
Our current deficit which continues to grow larger each year is the legacy that we leave our children and our children's children. I ask how fair is it to make the younger generation responsible for our parent's debts and our parent's bad decisions in which we had no part of it, no votes on it, and no power to prevent it, but yet upon their death their debts become our debts. We read in Proverbs 13:22, "A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children…", but the inheritance that our forefathers leave to us, are an unreasonable and an almost immeasurable debt, which is the equivalent to a double-taxation or worse on our earnings and income, forever.
Thomas Jefferson stated that "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living," and not thereby to the dead. Further to this point, we may ask, are the living to be the slaves and servants to the dead? It's not difficult to understand the importance of not being in perpetual debt. When you are in debt, your monies are compelled by law to go to your legally-protected creditors against your desired will, in which should you resist your fate you will suffer the indignity and the consequences of the removal of your personal property, liens on your salary, or a combination of both. Your diligent labors will no longer be a means to advance and sustain yourself and your family, but instead will become an instrument for your debt masters to extract all that they can from you. This means that for all practical purposes you are not your own man, and further that you will never be your own man, and that you are compromised, easy to manipulate, and weak.
America has become a country in which there is a rush to take everything that can be taken, to be entitled to everything that one can be entitled to, without thinking through the consequences of those actions. You cannot continually create something out of nothing nor repeatedly wring the bread from the sweat of other man's faces without facing the day of reckoning yourself at some point. Karl Marx said: "Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.”
It is high time to demand fiscal restraint and accountability from our government. The buck, my friend, lies with me and you.