Raising the Debt Ceiling is Nothing but Government Theft

 Growing up, I was taught that if I took something that didn't belong to me or I didn't earn, it was called "theft." That is what thieves do; they take things that don't belong to them with no intention of returning them. Some thieves might rationalize, "Oh, I'm just borrowing this; I'll return it someday." But they never do. What Congress is doing, in raising the "debt ceiling" for the umpteenth time, is nothing short of pure theft. They can say they are "borrowing" and will "pay it back someday." But they aren't; they can't and never will; they are stealing from you, me, and generations now and long into the future.

Permit me to give a simple example, and please refrain from arguing with details. It's just an example. Suppose my monthly income is $3,000, but I spend $5,000 monthly. After two years, I will be almost $50,000 in debt. What to do? "Ah," I say, "I will borrow the money." So, I borrow $100,000 to meet all my obligations. Now I am $150,000 in debt. I continue to spend $5,000 on my $3,000 income, and in two years, I am now about $200,000 in debt. What to do? "Ah," I say, "I will borrow the money to meet my obligations." So, I borrowed another $300,000. Now I am about $500,000 in debt. And I do this ad infinitum. And, of course, eventually, being unable to pay back the money that I "borrowed," I defaulted and filed for bankruptcy. I have done nothing but steal the money that was loaned to me. That is precisely what it was—theft. I took something that did not belong to me and used it for selfish purposes with no ability or intention of ever paying it back. Call it what it is—theft from somebody who trusted me to return what I borrowed from them. By the way, my name in this example is Sam Congress.

Obviously, my example does not conform to perfect reality, but you get the point. Congress spends and spends and spends until it is almost out of money and then "borrows" trillions more, claiming that someday it will pay it all back. What will the debt ceiling be now--$35 36 trillion? If they took every dime of every American living right now (not just "the rich"), they couldn't pay half that debt. So obviously, they are now "borrowing" (stealing because they will never pay it back) from our children, grandchildren, and beyond. They take the money now. They spend it on what THEY want to (useless wars around the world, etc.), and lie—flat out lie—to us and tell us that "someday it will be paid back." Some day. Kick the can down the road. After all, the current members are dead and gone. Let the next generation deal with the problem.

Incidentally, we know Congress is lying because they call this new theft "The Fiscal Responsibility Act." I guess thieves think they are being "fiscally responsible," too. At least they are paying for their drugs.

Given the nature of the American electorate over the past few generations, do we expect the next generation of voters to be smarter than we have been and hold Congress accountable to pay back the money it "borrowed"? Of course, most of us reading this will be dead, too, so it won't be our problem, either. Instead, we will be known to history as an utterly irresponsible generation for believing the lies our current Congress tells us. We know they are lying to us, and let them get away with it, anyway. How are we any better than they?

Kevin McCarthy should have said one thing: "NO!!! We are not raising the debt limit one-thin dime! Not only will we quit spending more money than we take in, but we are setting aside a substantial amount each month to pay the people we have previously borrowed from. No increase in the debt limit!"

That is what he should have said. That is what you and I must do. I can only spend more money every month than I receive; I can get away with it occasionally, in case of emergency, but I can only do that for a while. I must have more income than outgo. I can't continue to live off borrowed money. So I pay back borrowed money—or I default and file for bankruptcy. The latter might occasionally be unavoidable, but it is certainly the direction the American government is heading, and, in this case, is utterly inexcusable. These unconscionable thieves are making no serious effort to pay back what they are stealing from you, me, our children, grandchildren, ad infinitum. They never will. Let the next President and Speaker of the House deal with it. Or the one following them. Or the next. Until it all comes crashing down and destroys the American Republic.

Let me end this by quoting historian Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler from about 250 years ago: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse [money] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

You don't end debt with more debt.

The Supreme Court Finally Reins in EPA Water Czars

 A surprisingly unanimous Supreme Court decision last week finally clipped the ever-expanding wings of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

For more than half a century, imperious regulators at the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, with which it shares regulatory jurisdiction over “wetlands” and “navigable waters of the United States,” have worked to prevent citizens and businesses from taking common sense steps to develop privately owned property in ways that benefit them and which have no significant negative impact on the environment.

One ploy the EPA and the Army Corps often have used in their war on private property owners, is to assert expansive jurisdiction over small or occasional bodies of water and “wetlands” -- claiming these constitute “navigable waters of the United States,” and are therefore subject to regulation under the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA).

This was the predicament in which Michael and Chantell Sackett found themselves in 2007, when the EPA moved to stop them from improving their small parcel of property near Priest Lake, Idaho. The Sacketts had, in the eyes of Uncle Sam’s regulators, committed an egregious offense by failing to first obtain a Corps of Engineers permit before taking preliminary steps to improve their property. The government claimed the property contained “wetlands” that in some way and at some point in time had a “nexus” to a navigable waterway of the United States.

The Sacketts’ position was simple -- property with no waterway at all, much less one that is “navigable,” does not transmogrify into “navigable water” simply because it is near such a waterway and might contain some occasional “wetlands.” Despite this common sense interpretation of the scope of the Clean Water Act, the federal government continued for 16 years to harass the Sacketts.

Unlike many private property owners who have neither the money nor the time to wage a multi-year legal battle with the EPA or the Corps of Engineers, the Sacketts were represented in their struggle by the conservative public interest law firm, Pacific Legal Foundation, which enabled them to continue fighting until their historic victory.

Justice Alito, who authored last week’s Sackett opinion, identified clearly what was at stake. He noted, for example, that literally hundreds of millions of acres of “wetlands,” and virtually every piece of land with a channel or conduit for rainwater runoff would be subject to arbitrary government permitting control unless the EPA was reined in.

In fact, had the Sackett family been forced to throw in the towel, the Biden Administration was prepared and ready to implement an even broader regulation on “wetlands” and “navigable waters” it had proposed last January: “Revised Definition of ‘Waters of the United States.’” The gobbledygook in this proposed regulation is utterly, and purposefully undecipherable.

Biden’s proposal, which thankfully will now have to be redrafted in light of the Supreme Court’s decision, would have forced a landowner wanting to develop a parcel of land, to first determine if it contained any “wetland” that might have either a “continuous surface connection to a relatively permanent” waterway, or have a “significant nexus” such as might “significantly affect .  .  .  traditional navigable waters.”

Even if a property owner could figure all that out, they would still need to obtain a permit before taking any steps to develop their property -- a process that often takes years.

Alito’s opinion stops the EPA from forcing property owners to comply with its breathtakingly expansive wetlands position. In its place is a significantly narrower jurisdictional power that limits the EPA and the Corps of Engineers to only those wetlands that truly are “as a practical matter indistinguishable” from larger (i.e., “navigable”) bodies of water nearby; not those with some occasional or vague “nexus” to, or potential impact on actual “navigable waters.”

While environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, see an environmental disaster in the wake of the Sackett decision, in reality all the Supreme Court has done is to put the EPA back into the constitutional lane as intended by the 1972 law. It’s about time.

The Anniversary the Media Would Prefer You Forget

 How did I miss the third anniversary of George Floyd's death? Were the media caught sleeping? Three years ago, Floyd was given funerals in three states, carried in a gold casket and driven to his final resting place in a horse-drawn carriage. It was like the funeral for a pharaoh.

From Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, to the end of the year, The New York Times alone ran more than 4,000 articles about him. But exactly three years later, Floyd's name made it into only three Times items -- fleetingly and barely.

Are the media (and Democrats, and Hollywood, and corporate America, and the universities and grade schools, and hospitals and military and President Biden) hoping we'll forget about their weird campaign to make black Americans even angrier?

Since May 25, 2020, the single-minded message delivered to black people, without interruption or contradiction, has been that they live in a country steeped in white supremacy, anything bad that happens to them is proof of racism, and oh by the way, the police are trying to kill them.

The You Are a Victim! message is unlikely to produce stellar behavior in anyone. Directed at a group that already had a pretty high rate of criminal offending, it nearly destroyed our country.

By the end of 2020, the national homicide rate had shot up an unprecedented 30% and has continued to climb since then.

As Heather Mac Donald writes in her new book, "When Race Trumps Merit":

"New homicide records were set in 2021 in Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Rochester, Louisville, Toledo, Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Portland, and elsewhere. The violence continued into 2022. January 2022 was Baltimore's deadliest month in nearly 50 years, with 36 people killed, compared to 35 in 1973, when the city's population was much larger."

With the black community itself bearing the brunt of the violence, by now, the ruling class's fawning embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten tens of thousands of black people killed.

If I'd done that, I'd want everyone to forget about the "racial reckoning," too.

Although the hourly "racism updates" have ended, BLM's lies have calcified into received wisdom. It is still a matter of doctrine that black people are victims of systemically racist police.

In fact, as Mac Donald has been documenting for years, police are 400 times as likely to be killed by a black person as unarmed blacks are to be killed by cops.

Using the latest figures, in 2021, a grand total of eight unarmed blacks were killed by cops. That same year, an estimated 29 police officers were killed by black suspects. Of course, there are a lot more black people (47 million) than police officers (700,000). Thus, the apples-to-apples comparison works out to: For every 100,000 blacks, 1/100th of one unarmed black is killed by a cop; for every 100,000 cops, four are killed by black men.

Maybe it's the moms of black cops who ought to be giving their sons "The Talk." Son, do everything you can to avoid being assigned to a black neighborhood. Be alert at all times, even when sitting in your squad car. If at all possible, do not arrest a black suspect. If you absolutely have to, make sure you have backup.

One person too full of her own self-righteousness to notice that the rest of her party had decided to keep mum about the "racial reckoning" was Rep. Ilhan Omar. She marked the occasion by regurgitating the exact same boilerplate about racist cops and "black bodies."

"Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies," she told The Guardian, "it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher."

(What I admire most about third-world immigrants is their realization that their ancestors were people utterly incapable of building a functioning society, and therefore, if they happened to find themselves in a successful country, like the U.S., they should shut up, listen and learn.)

"State-sanctioned violence" against "black bodies"? The fact is all police shootings of blacks combined (justified, unjustified, armed and unarmed) is a smaller percentage of the black homicide rate (2%) than police shootings are of the white and Hispanic homicide rates (9%).

But the 98% of black people who are killed by other black people are of zero interest to the media or the Democratic Party. It's that crucial .01% of blacks killed by cops that get the headlines.

Neighbor: YOUR 9-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER WAS JUST GUNNED DOWN BY GANG MEMBERS IN A SACRAMENTO PARK!

Black mother: Please God, tell me the shooters weren't white!

After listing pages and pages of black children killed in black neighborhoods by black criminals, Mac Donald writes: "Since the black children's assailants are overwhelmingly black themselves, the country changes the subject, lest it be accused of a taboo attention to black crime."

So black bodies continue to pile up, and the only people who give a damn are conservatives -- and the police.

Happy anniversary.

Men are rapidly losing their close friends, poll finds

 The decline in male friendships has been precipitous. A May 2021 poll from the Survey Center on American Life revealed the number of American men who view themselves as having “no close friends” quintupled over the last 30 years, increasing from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2021. What’s more, just 15 percent of men consider themselves as having 10 or more close friends, a steep drop from the 40 percent of men who reported such bromances in 1990.

    
Men have experienced a much steeper decline in the number of close friends they have. It's dramatic. pic.twitter.com/dGiDHJtYDB
— Daniel Cox (@dcoxpolls) June 25, 2021

Although female friendships have also taken a hit over the years, their decline was less dramatic — 11 percent of women report having 10 or more close friends this year, down just 17 percent from 1990, and 10 percent say they have no close friends at all.

Oh, brother.

The May 2021 American Perspectives Survey polled 2,019 adults from May 14-May 23, 2021. Results have a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. See more results at the Survey Center on American Life.

Why Ron DeSantis Says the Debt Deal Is ‘Totally Inadequate’

 

After President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced that a deal had been reached to increase the debt limit and avoid a default, a number of conservative leaders have raised alarms that the negotiated agreement does not go far enough to address Democrats’ out-of-control spending. Among them is Florida Governor and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.

Joining Fox & Friends on Monday morning, DeSantis criticized what he called a “massive amount of spending” in the Biden-McCarthy deal, one that is “totally inadequate” to get America’s fiscal house “in a better spot.”

“Prior to this deal our country was careening towards bankruptcy, and after this deal our country will still be careening towards bankruptcy,” DeSantis said.

“To say you can do $4 trillion of increases in the next year and a half, I mean that’s a massive amount of spending,” the Florida Republican noted.

“I think that we’ve gotten ourselves on a trajectory here, really since March of 2020 with some of the COVID spending, it totally reset the budget and they’re sticking with that,” DeSantis continued. “I think that that’s just going to be totally inadequate to get us in a better spot.”
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WATCH: @RonDeSantis slams the “massive amount of spending” in the debt ceiling “deal.”
 
“Prior to this deal our country was careening towards bankruptcy. And after this deal, our country will still be careening towards bankruptcy.” pic.twitter.com/331Q0AcRab
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) May 29, 2023

”In Florida, we run big budget surpluses,” DeSantis said of his own governance. “We have a $1.2 trillion economy but our debt is only $17 billion — second lowest per capita in the country,” he noted.

“We make tough choices,” DeSantis said of Florida’s budget decisions, “and we make sure that we look forward to the long haul.”

Contrasting Florida with D.C., DeSantis pointed out that Congress does “these cycles to just get them through the next election, and that’s ultimately one of the reasons why they continue to fail.”

Evidently joining DeSantis is his concern about the debt deal are the House’s Chip Roy (R-TX) and Senate’s Mike Lee (R-UT):
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Thank you, @RonDeSantis, for speaking up about this. https://t.co/MeTTbw6P9F
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 29, 2023
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This entry was posted in Uncategorized on May 31, 2023.
House Passes Debt Deal to Avoid Default
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With barely five days remaining until the projected “X-date” on which the United States is set to default on its debt, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) brought the Fiscal Responsibility Act — legislation resulting from a negotiated spending deal made with President Joe Biden — to the floor for consideration.

The result: successful passage of the 99-page bill in a vote that came down 314-117.

Falling along anything but party lines, the legislation to raise the debt ceiling and avoid default was supported by 165 House Democrats and 149 House Republicans while 71 members of the GOP Conference voted no along with 46 Democrats:
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House okays debt ceiling bill 314-117
 
149 Republicans voted yea
165 Democrats voted yea.
 
So there were more Democratic yeas even though they are in the minority
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 1, 2023
 
B) 149 GOPers voted yea
165 Dems voted yea
 
71 GOPers voted no
46 Dems voted no
 
2 Dems missed the vote
2 GOPers missed the vote
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 1, 2023

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) heralded the successful vote on the Fiscal Responsibility Act, calling it “the most conservative spending package during my time in Congress” and “the largest deficit-reduction bill in at least a decade,” one that “will fundamentally change the spending trajectory in Washington.”

McHenry added:
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For the first time in a debt-limit negotiation, the U.S. government will spend less money than it did the year before. We achieved historic spending cuts that will help bring down inflation, consequential reforms to help Americans get out of poverty and back into the workforce, claw backs of billions of dollars of COVID money, and transformational permitting reforms that cut red tape for energy and infrastructure projects. This bill will block the Administration from imposing new taxes during a time of economic uncertainty and rein in Biden’s executive overreach through a statutory administrative pay-go rule. This agreement will also change the way Washington operates by compelling a workable appropriations process.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), one of the most vocal opponents of the deal, said he voted against the legislation “because our current financial situation is unsustainable, and this bill only ramps up the timeline to our government’s eventual default.”

Buck explained his reservations:
    
Back in 2022, the American people gave Republicans the majority in the U.S House of Representatives because they wanted us to rein in the Democrats’ out-of-control spending. Yet Speaker McCarthy chose to negotiate a deal that codifies the post-COVID 2022 discretionary spending baseline, adds $4 trillion to the debt in less than two years, upholds Biden’s student loan bailout, funds 85,000 new IRS agents, and ensures Democrats don’t have to deal with the political fallout of raising the debt ceiling prior to the 2024 election. I can't imagine a better deal for Democrats or a worse deal for our nation.

The legislation now heads to the U.S. Senate for a vote and, presuming its passage in the upper chamber, President Joe Biden’s desk for signature in time to prevent a default on the nation’s ever-increasing debt.