The National debt. Why raising taxes on anyone wont work.

There's an old saying - if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If only our leaders in Washington had taken that to heart oh so many years ago. Instead they listened to their constituents (us) who told them that they wanted more and more entitlements paid for, preferably, by someone else. This week we passed the $15 Trillion mark in our national debt. Just 10 short years ago our debt stood at $5.6 Trillion. The year I was born (1957) the national debt was $275 billion. To put that in perspective, $275 billion is about the same amount of interest that will have to be paid on President Obama's $900 billion stimulus package and the $400 billion Omnibus spending bill. And yes, the Chinese will want that in cash.

The President and his party have decided to run a class warfare campaign this election cycle. When you have no more ideas, you must demonize someone. And who better than the rich or near rich. After all, don't we all hate the rich? Well, not me. I love the 1%. They create jobs and opportunity. They take the financial risks that most of us wont take. They also pay 37% of federal taxes. The top 5% pay 58%. The bottom 50% pay 2.3%. Hardly equitable if you ask me. What about the shared sacrifice I hear so much about? When will the bottom 50% kick in just a little bit more? Just a tad. Just a smidgen.

Here's the dirty little secret you're not going to hear much. If all the wealth of people who earn over $250,000 a year were confiscated, it wouldn't be enough to run the government for 3 months. Bear in mind, we're talking about taking it all. 100%. That should give you an idea how much we spend at the federal level. $10 billion a day, to be exact. Every day. And we borrow $4 billion of that. Please explain to me how making the wealthy pay even more is going to erase that? The fact is - it wont.

It's entitlements. That's where the money is. Did you ever see that pie chart that shows how much federal spending goes towards entitlements? Of course you have. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid gobble up 56% of the chart. By 2049, just 37 years from now, Medicare and Social Security will consume 100% of all tax revenues. Because entitlement spending is funded on autopilot, no revenue will be left to pay for other government spending such as defense. Scared yet? You ought to be. Read on.

Total government spending has doubled since 1965.
Federal spending is growing faster than federal revenue.
Mandatory spending has increased 5X faster than discretionary spending. Federal spending outpaces inflation.
Defence spending has declined while entitlement spending has increased.
Total means-tested welfare spending (cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services for the poor) has increased 17-fold since the beginning of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964. Though the current trend is unsustainable, the Obama Administration plans to increase future welfare spending rather than enact true policy reforms.
The main driver behind long-term deficits is government spending—not low revenues. While revenue will surpass its historical average of 18.0 percent of GDP by 2021, spending will shoot past its historical average of 20.3 percent, reaching 26.4 percent in the same year.

BUT! Rather than enact real, necessary and yes, perhaps painful cuts - we've been told all we have to do if soak the rich for more. This tact insults my intelligence and it should insult yours as well. The geniuses in Washington have known for decades that this overspending would lead to collapse. But most of them would be long gone before the day of reckoning occurred so they didn't really care that they sold-out the country. They hooked us on entitlements - the crack of government spending. And now we must go through withdrawal to survive or collapse and die.

Class warfare is just a ruse, a tactic. It keeps people from seeing the real problem - spending. And if successful, will keep a certain party in power - free to exercise even more spending and more debt. Perhaps the day will come when a $15 trillion debt looked minuscule. Should that happen, I hope you have a lot of canned goods stored in your basement. Right next to the ammunition. You may need both.