The Good Ship Lollipop

As an Air Force navigator, I was trained to evaluate current circumstances and anticipate the future events our aircraft could encounter. One of my final preflight duties was to check the weather to determine if it would have an impact on our sortie. If it looked like a storm would compromise our mission, I would plot an alternative route to keep us out of harms way and ensure our objective was accomplished. I can tell you from experience, that flying through a storm while at the mercy of Mother Nature is not something you want to experience.

That’s why it was difficult for me to watch the movie, The Perfect Storm, because it was obvious that the main character and his crew were heading into trouble before he even left the dock. Greed, machismo, stupidity—or whatever one wants to call it—took hold and was the main reason the ship sank.

So here we are, floating in a metaphorical dinghy waiting for the good ship lollipop (U.S.) to toss us some lifesavers so we can make it back into the harbor of blissful content. “Don’t rock the boat” has been the mantra of our local leaders, who are seemingly oblivious to the raging storm that’s been pelting us. Not only is the CNMI in a “perfect storm,” but the U.S. is also experiencing a financial typhoon of its own. Greed was the fuel that drove us onto a reckless course, but ignorance is what will allow us to “stay the course” toward imminent disaster.

Quick fixes are not going to repair the damages that have been many years in the making. From all indications, it looks like this holiday season will be tough for many businesses because consumer confidence is at its lowest right now. With a worldwide recession in progress and the U.S. working vigorously to stimulate the economy, banks are still reluctant to give loans and consumers are tightfisted with their money.

Even if the economic recovery scheme foisted by the Fed and Treasury Secretary provides temporary relieve, it is only a Band-Aid that masks the cancerous growth that’s metastasizing throughout the U.S. We are reaching—if we haven’t already crossed the threshold—a point where it will be impossible to pay off the U.S. national debt. This has been a “storm” that’s been brewing for over two decades and largely ignored by politicians, aside from Ross Perot who ran for president in 1992 on the platform to reduce the national debt when it was only about $3.5 trillion.

You can see from the chart that the debt remained fairly stable after World War II until the 1970s when it started a gradual increase. In the mid-80s, it started a sharper upswing with Reagan’s military “star wars” program designed to bankrupt the Soviet Union as they tried to match the US missile defense system.

This tsunami-size economic debt wave was continued with Bush Senior, and then something interesting happened when Clinton jumped into the mix. The debt still grew, but it appeared to lose its steam. Was Clinton an economic godsend, as some Democrats would have you believe? No. One of the ways he slowed down the debt was to siphon-off all $2.9 trillion surpluses incoming to trust funds and replacing it with IOUs. This included spending every penny remaining in the Social Security trust fund on non-pension items. This would be as silly as the CNMI government raiding the retirement fund to pay off their $200 million debt, and declaring a financial victory. Sure it slowed things down for a while, but it put retirees at greater risk.

“W” Bush soon picked up the ball, and after 9-11 he never looked back when it came to deficit spending. It took almost two years to go from $8 to $9 trillion dollars. In late September of this year I looked at the debt at www.brillig.com/debt_us and it stood at $9.7 trillion. About six weeks later it has jumped to over $10.5 trillion, and the debt curve has now achieved vertical acceleration. For a fighter jet, that’s terrific; for debt, that’s horrific.

Now we have a newly elected President. Even though neither candidate gave much attention to the economy until it slapped them in the face, none has addressed the growing debt situation. Only Rep. Ron Paul, that crazy kook from Texas who didn’t know what he was talking about (as the mainstream media tried to portray him to the public during the Republican primaries), kept warning us about our dire economic circumstances.

Let’s pray that the new President will have the ability and resolve to do what it takes to keep the good ship lollipop from capsizing during this perfect storm. As for me, I’m going to tune into what Rep. Paul has to say about the situation, since he is the only Washington “insider” that’s consistently offered reliable advice.