You may have heard that our Congress saw fit to pass an “Aid Bill” yesterday. It is a little complicated, since the total foreign aid package is a little south of $100 Billion bucks. the pckage includes three discrete Bills, the largest of which is destined for Ukraine, at right around $61 Billion. The remainder is going to Israel and Taiwan, with about $15 Billion to the former and just under $9 Billion to the Taiwanese.
Our Congress on the other side of the gray-brown river hs been active since they came back to town after a period of ‘District Business” back home arranging re-election finances. That is similar to what they used to do, only the money they allegedly managed was the budget of the whole government, not the little portion required for them to stay in office.
We retired from government service about two decades ago. That is the interval for revolutions once recommended by Thomas Jefferson, who observed the capability of generations to slide into corruption in the space of single working careers. We were part of a national government that was imperfect but lurched generally forward each year.
We continue to lurch, of course, but seem to require a change to the way we keep our calendars.
A look at the Fiscal 2025 President’s Budget is useful, since we are only now passing the detritus of last year’s funding now that we are seven months into it. The top of our government is contained generally in only three departments. The Department of the Treasury is nearly five trillion bucks all by itself, and is the pathway for a variety of entitlement programs largely undiscussed since they are “third rail’ fully charged issues.
Same deal for the Department of Health and Human Services, with two and a half trillion in annual expenses in things like Medicare. Third largest is the one for which there is only an entitlement for only a portion of the funding. That is the Defense Department, with around a trillion and a half in its disparate components.
If you throw in Social Security, a program designed to regurgitate money expropriated directly from the taxpayers wallets, you hit the magical amount of nearly ten trillion in annual walking around money.
Aif you sipped down through the budget, there are several accounts in the wasteland of the middle billions of dollars, but would get fairly rapidly to the equivalent of the combined air package going to a former Russian Republic in Eastern Europe, our old Mid East ally in Jerusalem and the lonely island of ambiguous parentage across the strait from the PRC.
We appear to be closing in on a circumstance that will require an adjustment larger than the one that rose in 1976. We have been spending money not appropriated since the current fiscal year began more than seven months ago.
We are not quite sure how that works, since it Congress that is supposed to control the national cash register, Instead, some other legislative slight-of-hand permits us to borrow something like a trillion dollars every hundred days. That is a budget that includes interest on a sum of dollars so vast that it is unlikely to ever be repaid without some major reallocation of the currency and the debt.
Our grandchildren are already alive. They are likely to be a little cross with us when they are old enough to figure out what we have bequeathed them,
We expect to be on our dirt nap by the time they figure it out. We suspect their response will be to bill their offspring as we did, but there is the real alternative it will do something simpler.
It is why the Founders of this nation deliberately chose only part of the Democratic principal of self-governance. The grand experiment in Constitutional Republics had a fairly good run, but we seem to have built a vast structure doomed to inevitable collapse, you know? We suspect there is going to be some muttering about this when the word gets around to what we have done.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com