As some might have been able to surmise, I do not like to make my blogs political statements. But after what has happened in Washington State and in the United States Congress with our budgetary situation, I felt it was time for me to speak my piece on the subject of Federal entitlements and VA benefits.
I have heard comments in my local travels around Clark County about how we should just cut the defense budget, foreign aid, the Enviromental Protection Agency or the many other offices of the federal government to pay these entitlement costs.
What I cannot believe is that our local population understands the issue very well. I do not think that they believe that they need to have a hands-off my pocketbook or entitlement-itis or do not my favorite program. Maybe they are wholely ignorant about the financing of these great society programs that have been brought into existance in the 1930's and in some cases, as late as the 1970's to help people out of a jam.
I personally believe that these federal entitlements have become these growing and out-of-control financial monsters that have not been no one at the federal level has ever had the guts to stand up and say, Wait a minute? How much do we have left? Or asked any further questions to clarify or get a handle on this problem. It has always been hand the hot political potato off to the next generation of political leadership, instead of dealing with the immediacy of it.
Sure, there was some changes under Bush2, that helped create a donut hole and some other additional perscription relief. But what I remember from the last three or four presidents was that no one was willing to dare to ask the hardware question of where is the money going to come from?
And now our problem is going to balloon into an even huger problem with a growing, aging populations and a growing and bigger Veterans from multiple wars that we have fault over the last fifty years, some fresh from Gulf 1 and 2 - Afghanistan and previous engagements of Vietnam, Korea and several other engagements.
I am all for helping people out to get them on their feet and if they are SERIOUSLY developmental problems, get them the local help if it is needed. Clark County can show the United States how we can take care of our veterans and some of our other residents as best we can financially.
But there is a bigger question that is going to be facing my generation of Gen X and Y'ers. How are we going to deal with this ballooning debt situation that will possibly come due on our watch here as United State citizens. I would love to hear some local commentary on this situation. Because politically and very soon, there are not going to be the options.
Representative Paul Ryan has a plan and options. I bet there are several others out there in our nation that have ideas to help. It is going to take a national ADULT discussion, asking people on these programs lower their expectations of what they are used to be able to get under these programs and ask every single American if they can help find ways to cut, reduce fraud or save money within these government entitlements.
Make no bones about what is coming up in our nation, there are gong to have to be significant cuts, restructuring of these programs to make them sustainable. And with the future savings, we can plow that to pay off the people both foreign and domestic that hold debt notes. There comes a point we have to ask ourselves, could you continue to live on credit cards, the family budget or piecemealing out bad checks and not be able to be forced through societal shame or some other tool to payback what you have spent?
This is what the entitlements are at now. My generation is coming into political power and the Vietnam and World War 2 generations are now leaving the last poltical vestiges to us to handle, botht hrough retirement or scandal at the executive and legislative branches or at the simple government job level, they are being replaced by younger generations. And in some circumstances, the jobs are evaporating.
And finally, we are now being handled the reigns of the political hot potato that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and successive presidents have signed into law and passed the political bucket down the road until we now are faced with fallout.
And the very NEXT political Hot Potato that is going to have to be dealt with is our defense sector and all the jobs that it entails in ordinary America. I'll leave that for another post. Its a discussion we need to have and to figure out if we can still afford being the world's intervening police force through the United Nations.....
