You see the signs
But you can't read
You're running at
A different speed
--Robert Palmer
Hand wringing is underway over the spectre of mandatory $85 billion in federal spending cuts if officials cannot come to an alternative agreement by Friday.
The cuts, strangely labeled a 'sequester,' are a consequence of the Summer 2011 compromise regarding raising the debt ceiling. The sequester has been postponed a few times already as politicians put off the unpleasantries of reducing their source of power.
That we are fretting over $85 billion in cuts on $3.5 trillion in annual spending (~2.5% of budget) demonstrates how addicted we have become.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
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Deficits and a mounting debt, therefore, are a growing and intolerable burden on the society and economy, both because they raise the tax burden and increasingly drain resources from the productive to the parasitic, counterproductive, “public” sector. Moreover, whenever deficits are financed by expanding bank credit—in other words, by creating new money—matters become still worse, since credit inflation creates permanent and rising price inflation as well as waves of boom-bust “business cycles."
~Murray Rothbard, 1992
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