The costly truth about government 'spending'

Paul Mullen and Richard Stern, Tribune News Service

Government spending is stealing your future. Each year, the federal government takes and spends nearly one-quarter of every dollar earned in America — roughly $52,000 per household. This affects all of us. Government spending may seem like a remote issue with no connection to your daily life, but that’s false. It has a direct impact on your life and the well-being of your loved ones. In fact, you are already feeling the pain of government spending. From higher prices at the grocery store to the rising costs of rent and energy, the economic pain and even hopelessness many Americans are experiencing is the direct result of how much our government is spending — and has already spent.

The truth is, all government spending burdens you and ultimately comes at your expense. Since government has no money of its own, it cannot give anything to anyone without first taking it from someone else. The government can’t spend one dollar on anything without first taking that dollar from another American — whether visibly, through an obvious tax, or invisibly and insidiously through inflation (the creation of new money), which steals value from your dollars. Either way, you are paying.

Every year, come appropriations time, Congress is initially unable to come to a spending agreement. As the funding deadline approaches, there is fearful talk of a government shutdown. Political theater ensues until both sides “compromise” and agree to borrow more money — on top of the $37,000 of taxes they are already taking per US household per year — to pay for Congress’s ever-increasing spending.

This creates a massive deficit each year and adds to our already eye-watering national debt — in excess of $260,000 per household right now.

Congress borrows this money through two dangerous methods, both of which harm you. First, in a process called “crowding out,” it uses its monopoly on force to lure private capital investment away from the private sector. This boxes out Americans looking to buy a home or start a small business. Second, and more subversive, it borrows from the Federal Reserve, which simply prints new money out of thin air. This expands or inflates the total amount of money in circulation and devalues all existing dollars, including the dollars you’ve saved. In this way, the impact of the $15,000 per household that the federal government “borrows” each year is felt through higher interest rates, fewer jobs, lower rates of home ownership, and of course, much higher price inflation.

Government spending raises prices on literally everything including food, cars, homes, energy, rent, etc. In simple terms, government spending is economically choking you to death.

The dollars you own don’t buy as much because the government has spent some of their value and made them worth less. In stark terms, Congress is the bank robber, the Fed is the getaway driver, and you are the bank. Since 2009, the federal government has been responsible for regularly operating at a $1 trillion (that’s $1,000,000,000,000) deficit per year. In fact, it’s estimated that in 2030 the annual deficit will crack $2 trillion each year — and sooner if the DC Cartel can pass more spending bills. These numbers are mind boggling and begin to lose their meaning, but they do matter.

These borrowed deficits and the taxes taken from you are both ways that the government steals your earnings and then redistributes them to those favored by politicians. Every bag of concrete used to build a bridge to nowhere is concrete not used to build a new home. In the same way, the government steals your time, the fruits of your labor, your freedom, and your future. Guided by lobbyists and special interests, the people who write these spending bills consistently try to trick the public, loading them with “budget gimmicks” and giving them flowery names, which in many cases are the exact opposite of what the bill will actually achieve in the real world.

Consider the ironically named, “Inflation Reduction Act” which spent (stole) billions of dollars the government did not have and has poured gasoline on the flames of price inflation already burning Americans. The $34.5 trillion of national debt is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the government’s theft from the American people. With a history of abuse like this, the solution cannot be that government needs to take more.

We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. It’s not only time to trim government and its spending, it’s time to slash trillions and return this money to the hard-working American families who earned it in the first place.