TOO MUCH ASKED OF AMERICA

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.  - President John F. Kennedy     January 20, 1961 

A few months ago my family visited the Statute of Liberty. Since 9/11 you are no longer allowed to climb much beyond the pedestal, but the experience was still a moving one. As I patiently stood in the long security line for the metal detectors and the GE EntryScan3 walk-through explosives detection portals, I looked up at Lady Liberty and noticed that she seemed to be a little tired. It has been nearly fifty years since John F. Kennedy asked American citizens to make a deposit, rather than a withdrawal from their country. The weight of America’s continued failure to heed those wise words was clearly evident on Lady Liberty.

This past New Year was a significant one for America. 2008 marked the first year when those born in 1946 – the first of the Baby Boomers - reach Social Security's early retirement age of 62. From now until 2025, every year will see another crop of boomers reach the magic threshold. Like a Marine battalion advancing against its enemy, Social Security's future problems approach slowly, but their arrival is inevitable. Over the next 10 years, $100 billion a year surpluses, which Congress currently spends, will continue to shrink and then disappear completely. Without those surpluses to offset the federal budget deficit, Congress will have no choice but to again raise taxes, cut programs, or let annual deficits climb. And then the wheels will really come off the cart.

Somewhere around 2017, on top of replacing Social Security's $100 billion annual surplus, Congress will have to find billions more to make good on all of the benefits that it has promised. In a few short years, the additional money needed will reach $100 billion a year (not counting inflation). From there, the annual demands will reach first $200 billion a year, and soon $300 billion a year.

Then there is Medicare.

The reality is that together, Social Security and Medicare will consume an estimated 60% of income taxes collected by 2025, and nearly 100% by 2048. What's left would have to finance the entire rest of the government. Moody’s has even recently said that the U.S. could lose its AAA bond rating within 10 years.

Instead of making tough choices that would fix the gaping hole in the proverbial dike, Democrats and Republicans teamed up to heap Medicare D (prescription drug program) onto Lady Liberty’s shoulders, at a cost approaching $1.3 trillion by 2016, according to Medicare chief Mark McClellan. The entire federal budget is only $2.7 trillion! President Bush called the bill a “major victory” and even conservatives like our own Jim Sensenbrenner voted for the program.

The coming apocalypse is the financial equivalent of the meteor in the movie Armageddon. With an impending disaster of this magnitude, surely the current crop of presidential candidates are lining up with ideas to fix the problem. Mention Social Security, however, and all you hear are crickets chirping. Instead, any suggestion of taking away programs such as these has become the dreaded “third rail” – touch it and 30,000 volts blows off your hand. As a fireball the size of Argentina hurtles toward earth at nearly a million miles per hour, those elected to protect us simply put on sun glasses.

Social Security Insurance, as it was originally known, was intended as insurance – a fallback for widows at a time when the life expectancy of men was much shorter than women. It was to provide a helping hand for workers who retired at age 65, financed by contributions these workers made over their career. In a spectacular explosion reminiscent of the Big Bang, it has expanded to something it was never intended to be – a retirement plan which gives us the right - at age 62 – to enjoy our old age while sipping umbrella drinks on the beach. It is now the largest government entitlement program on the planet and growing daily.

Our founding fathers would not recognize the federal government of today. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Washington is even backing private car warranties and before long will be giving away the unpopular and unprofitable hybrids it has forced Detroit to make to anyone who doesn’t have a job. And yet, advocates of statism continue to speak indignantly, manipulate public perception, create class envy, invent new definitions for racism, and demonize capitalism and the very free market economy which has produced the trillions of dollars being given away – all in the name of making government even bigger.

Social Security is only the beginning. Attitudes among so many Americans today revolve around what our country can do for us, which programs benefit us, which politician is offering more unemployment benefits, bigger school grants, or free health care. Even local government is infected with the “gimme disease” – building needless projects for fear of losing federal dollars or grants. I’d like to see how a politician running for office would fare with a platform asking all Americans to serve a mandatory two years in the military, a volunteer organization, or a charity – for free. Cynically, I think they’d run a distant second to whoever finished second last. In a desperate effort to pay for the growing public attitude that our country owes us, we have mortgaged America by borrowing from our children and others without any thought as to how this debt would be repaid. Our current national debt is a mind-boggling $9 trillion, and is growing by a staggering $2 billion per day - $7 million while you read this article. And this was before the "stimulus bill" which threw billions at ACORN and the multiple bailout bills of our new administration.

So just who do we owe this debt to? The money is borrowed from buyers of Treasury securities -- which are basically a big batch of IOUs that are auctioned off every three months. As the auction date approaches, the Treasury figures out how much it will need to pay off old debt and cover the government’s latest round of overspending. Half of our debt - $4.5 trillion - is owed to the U.S. government itself, as round after round of wasteful and deficit spending is paid for by simply issuing ourselves more securities – a practice that would result in a prison sentence for any American. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most of the government’s holdings are for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and welfare. The remainder of the debt is owed to countries like Japan ($644 billion), China ($350 billion), and the United Kingdom ($239 billion), as well as state and local governments ($467 billion), individual investors ($423 billion) and insurance companies and banks ($283 billion).

And this was all before Obama's record $2 trillion deficits which followed the hope and change rhetoric on the campaign trail and the massive and ineffective bailouts which saw bankruptcy close at their heals.

There are three types of conquest: military, religious, and economic. In economic conquest, you place the inhabitants under tribute or debt, and slowly take over their country economically. America is being conquered without a shot being fired, and we don’t even realize it.

The national debt has become so large that if we started selling U.S. real estate, buildings, aircraft carriers, and football stadiums to repay the debt, we would have to sell everything in America – three times over – to simply pay down the debt, which would then start climbing again because of our deficit spending. And we’ve only been discussing the federal debt; state and local governments account for an additional $2 trillion in debt.

Yet politicians continue to ask more of our country. Free national health care ($1 trillion). An expanded SCHIP program ($160 billion). The list is endless.  In September, Hillary Clinton proposed giving every baby born in America $5,000 – a compassionate proposal that would cost America an additional $20 billion a year. In her book, It Takes A Village, Hillary espouses universal pre-school ($18 billion). Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is proposing socialized medicine in California ($14 billion). Here in Wisconsin, Democrats in the Assembly proposed state-wide socialized medicine ($15.2 billion). 

The notion of ‘tax and spend’ Democrats has lost its meaning in light of our last Republican Congress which thought vote-getting would be easier with compassionate spending, rather than fiscal conservatism, and a Republican President who seemed to have misplaced his veto pen. The notion of raising taxes as a solution may be inevitable, but American workers already work well into May in order to pay their federal, state, and local taxes – and that doesn’t even include sales taxes and the dozens of other hidden taxes and fees paid every day. The typical American family pays more in total taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined. That's over 38 percent for total taxes vs. 28 percent for food, clothing and housing.

Compounding the problem is rampant government waste and inefficiency. Taxpayers spend $20 billion per year for 165 job-training programs that are administered by 15 different federal agencies. There are 342 economic development programs managed by 13 agencies, and little or no coordination. Ten departments, three independent agencies, one federal commission, one presidential council, and one quasi-official agency administer 131 juvenile programs at a cost of $4 billion per year. The federal education bureaucracy involves more than 788 programs in 40 different federal agencies at a cost of nearly $100 billion each year. An estimated 30 cents of every federal educational dollar is lost in overhead and never makes it to the classroom. Each year, the U.S. government funds hundreds of programs that largely benefit businesses and private industries which could, and should, finance these activities without taxpayer assistance.  In FY 1998, appropriations for such corporate welfare totaled approximately $40 billion.  Producing and publishing statistical data on the country's economic and social makeup involves 70 different agencies within 12 Cabinet departments.

A recent USA Today reported that Hurricane Katrina victims have filed claims against the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers for the levee failures, totaling more than $12 trillion – more than entire annual output of the national economy.

As a nation, we have forgotten that America is us, and our children It is not a government employee with a checkbook. We only hurt ourselves and our children by allowing America to be conquered economically. Every program has good intent at its roots, but at some point we must face the fact that we can only afford so much compassion. To pour salt in the wound, so many in America and abroad seemingly despise the country that does so much for so many, without asking for much in return.

I’m not suggesting that the unfortunate, the poor, the elderly, and others don’t deserve some help. I’m simply saying that if we love our children – the same children we struggle so hard for to be sure they graduate college without significant students loans and debt – we should do anything, and endure any sacrifice, to be certain we don’t saddle our children with a debt that currently amounts to nearly $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Yet we don’t. Instead, we selfishly continue to ask what else our country can do for us. The Greatest Generation sacrificed for us; we can surely sacrifice for the next generation. Our sacrifice will require higher taxes, should require doing with less, but must require significant slashing of a hemorrhaging federal budget fraught with waste, fraud, and inefficiency. Government can’t fix our problems. It wasn’t intended to and can’t afford to.

We may be the world’s lone superpower, but we’re under assault and are being conquered economically from within, and without. It’s high time to let other countries know that America’s children alone will not get the bill for keeping the planet safe, for fighting terror, and for helping countries half the globe away to develop and modernize. We all too often forget the words of John F. Kennedy which followed his more famous “Ask not” appeal: “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” Now that would make the Statute of Liberty smile!