Trillion

Heartland’s Donald Kendal is joined by Isaac Orr, Policy Fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, in episode #180 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s episode features work from the Foundation for Economic Education, the Pacific Research Institute, the American Action Forum, and the Institute for Energy Research.

The U.S. economy continues its Barack Obama Administration-long hobbled limp. President Obama will be our nations first tonever, ever have even one year of 3% or higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth.

Everything in Washington, D.C. established to do X – ends up doing X, Y, Z, and triplets of every letter in the alphabet. This anti-federalism is fueled by several basic precepts. Of course DC wants as much power as it can grab. The more power it wields – the more it can lord over us and the more favors it can dole out. And the more coin it can spend – and the more coin it can justify taking from us.

The news is filled with the everyday zigzags of those competing against each other for the Democrat and Republican Party nominations to run for the presidency of the United States. But one of the most important issues receiving little or no attention in this circus of political power lusting is the long-term danger from the huge and rising Federal government debt.

Fiscal conservatives had mixed emotions, to say the least, about the $1.6 trillion omnibus budget bill that was corralled through Congress by Republicans and Democrats alike. Among the few bright spots of this pork-laden spending package was a provision to lift the crude oil export ban which has been in effect since the Carter administration.

Uncle Sam has added nearly an additional half a trillion dollars to the national debt over the past twelve months. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Federal government ended its fiscal year on September 30, 2015 with a budget deficit of a “mere” $435 billion. Total Federal expenditures for the fiscal year were nearly $3.7 trillion, while Federal tax receipts came to around $3.3 trillion.

Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democrat presidential nominee. (Sorry, Bernie Sanders fans. You too, Martin O’Malley fans – both of you.) Unless – and likely even if – she is indicted for her latest foray into self-defined ethics. She has in her past more than a quarter century of…questionable statements, decisions and actions – so it would appear nothing else in this vein will matter to the Democrat rank and file.

Socialism is a failed ideology. It was the avant-garde approach to how to do government – in the Twentieth Century. The Soviet Union was the flagship petri dish. That conquered, infiltrated or ingratiated themselves with many other nations – to establish them as additional petri dishes (Hello, Cuba). We certainly now have a large enough, long enough sample set – and the results are in. The system is contaminated – Socialism does not work.

Even so, you do not have to be smart with numbers to know that the real state of the U.S. economy is pathetic these days. You can thank Barack Obama for that because, dear reader, he is utterly clueless regarding America’s economy; how it works, and what it needs to work.