U. S. will not default
For all of
the talk that the sky will fall if we default on the national debt, there is
one thing you could bet your house and lot on, with no fear of losing. It’s that the United States will not default
on its debt obligations. Peter Morici is
a former chief economist with the International Trade Commission. He is currently a professor of international
business at the R. H. Smith School of Business.
When he was a guest on Fox News on Monday, 10/7/13 a little after 1:00
PM he said that the United States takes in two hundred and fifty billion
dollars a month in taxes – it’s not exactly broke - and it pays twenty five
billion every month toward interest on its debt obligations. The only way a country can go into default is
for it not to keep pace with paying the interest on the national debt. If that happened it would cause serious
consequences for its credit rating. Now,
what do you think would be the first thing the Government would want to tap the
$250,000,000,000 it takes in every month to pay for?
President
Obama, Senators Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid and all the rest of the Democrat
fear-mongers know that the average Joe is not knowledgeable enough about the
machinations of government to see through the lies they’re telling him. They know that Joe knows more about what’s
happening with Lindsay Lohan and the movie stars in Hollywood than they know
about what goes on in Washington, DC.
They can tell him anything. And,
with the mainstream media thoroughly in the pocket of this administration there’s
no lie that won’t be thoroughly embellished and polished like a shiny red apple
for Joe’s consumption.
Like a
pouting schoolboy, Obama is doing everything he can to make the partial
shutdown and the sequester as painful for people as he possibly can. He’s spending all his time campaigning to
create the impression that the partial shutdown is because the Republican held
House of Representatives won’t help him squeeze every drop of blood from the
American taxpayer to help him pay for every nanny entitlement he can think of. Closing the doors to the White House for tours
for schoolchildren, barricading the open air WWII Memorial to keep out war
veterans for their ceremonies and every other petty nuisance he can create are
all designed to promote the image that it’s the fault of the mean old
Republican controlled “House.” That
house is also the custodian of the American taxpayer’s dollar and is doing what
it can to keep a spending-our-of-control executive from digging into our worn
out pockets. The multimillion dollar
vacation Obama and his family took to Kenya recently could have paid for months
of whatever costs are incurred to keep some of the sites open that he closed.
The most
disgraceful act of all has been Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s refusal to
allow the death benefits to be paid to the families of fallen service people in
Afghanistan since the partial shutdown. Surely
out of that two hundred and fifty billion dollars that gets paid into the
treasury monthly the $100,000 dollars that gets paid to the several dozen families
of service people who died in action should be able to be found. That should be one of the highest priorities
of responsibilities to be taken care of.