The primary victory of Zohran Mamdani and the wedding of Bezos/Sanchez happened in the same week. Together they say a great deal about how bad our situation is.
Mamdani's campaign basically was about how New York City - the 'Emerald City' of the capitalist Oz - is unaffordable for the majority of its citizens. Even though many of his proposals would not make it through any political process, that even suggesting something different for the working class of NYC was enough for the rich to proclaim they're all leaving - or to man the barricades on Wall Street (check that - they'd hire someone else to do that).
Meanwhile, Bezos' wedding apparently cost $25 million - that number is under some debate, and it's unclear if it included the costs of private airplanes and luxury housing for all his privileged guests. But the sense of entitlement and privilege reeked from even the one or two photos I was able to stomach.
That the owners live in their own privileged bubble - protected from the existence of the great unwashed or seeing them as just backdrop to their own fabulous lives, says there is no solution to the reckless spending of this criminal empire.
While Dickens was talking about London and Paris, today it's New York City and Venice, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..."
I greatly enjoyed seeing the resistance put up by Italians to Bezos taking over Venice for the day. As I understand it, the poor chap was forced to alter the location of some of his festivities. Italians, heck, Europeans on the whole, have far more class consciousness than our own befuddled citizens.
Thanks TomR... If Life for most People in the USA becomes untenable, and the USA falls into Civil Chaos... I suspect that $$$ won't be available for the Military, and the Oligarchs will flee since they are Citizens-Of-The-World... For Example, Look At What Happened In Russia...
I've read that New Zealand is one of the preferred bug-out locations for the super rich if everything falls apart up here. Even the Hobbits can't escape them.
Thanks TomR... I've also Read that NZ is one of the preferred escapes... Now the Cost-Of-Living there is driving out Middle-Class families... The Oligarchs are Parasites that Suck the Blood of others... With the World running out of Potable Water, Do WE Need Another Trump Golf-Course?...
It's my understanding that, as of a few years ago, you have to have $500,000 in the bank before NZ will even let you in. Of course, the minimum may be more now....
I don't think A.Word.A.Day (Wordsmith.org) is subscribed to Bracing Views, but just now it sent us this:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. -Frédéric Bastiat, economist and writer (30 Jun 1801-1850)
Plutarchy and Kakistocracy. America has long been a plutarchy but never has the wealth/power been so concentrated with men who care so little for the common good and certainly lacking skills at improving the nation's welfare but men but in fact loath democracy with laser focus and skills at plundering profiteering. Even in the Gilded age the wealthiest gave more thought to the common good then do the likes of Bazos Musk...What we have in America is extreme Plutarchy and Kakistocracy.
John D. Rockefeller--the original--was famed for giving away dimes to common folks if he was out in public (imagine how many bodyguards he'd have today if he condescended to be seen in public!). Back then, a dime would buy a person an entire lunch or a generous mug of beer. In my father's young adulthood (he was born 1911), a quarter would still buy a meal.
Bill have you read any articles on MMT. This theory if I understand it correctly states the USA lends money to writ large and writ large spebds it. It's where the money that lent goes that determines what our society looks like. Currently the loaned money goes proportionately to the MIC/Surveillance industries. But it could also go to social programs, educational programs, programs that are progressive. The loaner (our government) prints it we borrow it and do whatever with it. MMT I think states the amount of money loaned is irrelevant....its how its used that's relevant.
I need to read more about this theory but: your thoughts?
I think I understood MMT some years ago, but the details are fuzzy now. Lord Keynes is often fingered as the villain behind the notion of gov't intervention in the economy. But he only approved of very SHORT TERM stimulation in times of crisis. What we have now is called "kicking the can farther down the road." Our children, their children, and their children in turn, etc. will end up having to pay the tab for today's reckless war spending. "Funny" how little waste and inefficiency Musk's DOGE crew was able to find at the Pentagon, eh??
Some more from Dylan: "I asked him what his name was/And how come he didn't drive a truck/He said his name was Columbus/And I just said 'Good luck!'" :-)
I've often seen it claimed that Bill Clinton achieved a balanced budget. But I believe he employed some kind of trickery, something to do with shifting future Social Security benefits from the debit to the assets side of the ledger.
The wealthy have been gaming the system even more than usual since the 1980s. Reagan is idolized by the wealthy because he was the one who got the US started on the massive tax shift from the wealthy to working people. The obvious way to raise revenues is to stop coddling rich people, and go back to the 90% top tax rate for people who earn too much while sitting at home relaxing. The rich rigged the system, now the problem is how to unrig it.
"So, Congress and the President do what they always do . . ."
Which is why WE THE PEOPLE need to replace the traitorous blowhards in the Executive and Legislative branches. REGIME CHANGE IN WASHINGTON DC! (Is this so difficult to grasp?)
The Tenth Amendment Center’s Michael Boldin offers this overview of America’s Founders' views on National Debt... :
NATIONAL DEBT AND THE DESTRUCTION OF LIBERTY
“I go on the principle that a Public Debt is a Public curse”
James Madison didn’t see public debt as a mere policy debate or a nuisance to be dealt with later. He saw it as one of the most dangerous threats to a representative system – one that leads straight to corruption, tyranny, war, and collapse.
He was far from alone. Again and again, leading voices from the founding generation warned that a government hooked on debt is a system headed for disaster.
The Founders understood something we’ve forgotten: debt isn’t just bad economics. It’s a weapon that destroys republics.
THE EVIL CALAMITY
During the ratification debates, the Anti-Federalist writer Brutus painted a stark picture.
“I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than to be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge.”
We’ve exceeded that threshold. By orders of magnitude.
Decades earlier, during the height of the American Revolution, James Otis, Jr. saw how Britain’s debt was crushing the colonies.
“The national debt is confessed on all hands, to be a terrible evil.”
The colonists bore the burden of an empire’s extravagance. Sound familiar?
Even after independence, President George Washington treated debt as an existential threat. In his Fifth Annual Message to Congress, he warned:
“No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt. On none can delay be more injurious or an economy of time more valuable.”
LIBERTY’S UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Tench Coxe understood the stakes: “The liberties of a people involved in debt, are as uncertain as the liberty of an individual in the same situation. Their virtue is more precarious.”
Individual debtors remain bound by law. Indebted governments seek to destroy it.
“The unfortunate citizen must yield to the operation of the laws, while a bankrupt nation too easy annihilates the sacred obligations of gratitude and honor, and becomes execrable and infamous.”
History proves him right. Thomas Gordon, in his Works of Sallust, showed how Caesar used debt to destroy the Roman Republic.
“Cæsar, besides wasting all his own Substance, ran in Debt near Two Millions of our Money, by bribing the People, and their Tribunes.”
The lesson was clear. Debt was the tool that enabled the destruction of liberty.
“Cæsar did by Bribes what his Sword, without them, never could have done, oppressed the Liberty of his Country.”
John Taylor of Caroline exposed how a national debt creates a self-perpetuating system of corruption.
“A spell is put upon our understandings by the words ‘publick faith and national credit,’ which fascinates us into an opinion, that fraud, corruption and oppression, constitute national credit; and debt and slavery, publick faith.”
Taylor then revealed how debt corrupts the entire legislative process.
“A legislature, in a nation where the system of paper and patronage prevails, will be governed by that interest, and legislate in its favour.”
Once captured by creditors, legislators turn government into a jobs program for themselves and their cronies.
“Such a legislature will create unnecessary offices, that themselves or their relations may be endowed with them. They will lavish the revenue, to enrich themselves.”
Most insidious of all, they make themselves the middlemen in their own debt scheme:
“They will borrow for the nation, that they may lend. They will offer lenders great profits, that they may share in them.”
Benjamin Rush, in a letter to James Madison, laid out the true consequences of public debt:
“Nothing fundamentally unjust can ever produce happiness in its issue. It will lay the foundation of an aristocracy in our country.”
Rush warned that the debt-based system would make a mockery of every principle that built the young Republic.
“It will change the property of nine-tenths of the freeholders of the States, and it will be a lasting monument of the efficacy of idleness, speculation, and fraud above industry, economy, and integrity in obtaining wealth.”
THE FINAL STAGE
When the people finally recognize the scam, Taylor warned, the political class doesn’t surrender – it tightens the grip.
“As grievances gradually excite national discontent, they will fix the yoke more securely, by making it gradually heavier.”
But gradual oppression has limits. When the people can no longer bear the weight, when they prepare to throw off the yoke entirely, only one option remains for government.
“And they will finally avow and maintain their corruption, by establishing an irresistible standing army, not to defend the nation, but to defend a system for plundering the nation.”
The corrupt system needs fuel. And that fuel is you. Mercy Otis Warren warned where this leads.
“The artificial creation of expenses by those who deem a public debt a public blessing, will easily suggest plausible pretences for taxation, until every class is burdened to the utmost stretch of forbearance, and the great body of the people reduced to penury and slavery.”
There’s no limit to how far they’ll push it. Destutt de Tracy saw exactly what happens.
“Now history teaches us that it is in fact since governments have had what is called credit, that is to say the possibility of employing in an instant the funds of several years, that they have no longer set bounds either to their prodigality, or their ambition, or their projects.”
Jefferson understood this well. Debt is the most corruptive force – worse than any external threat.
“There does not exist an engine so corruptive of the government and so demoralizing of the nation as a public debt. It will bring on us more ruin at home than all the enemies from abroad against whom this army and navy are to protect us.”
That’s why in a letter to Pres. Washington, Jefferson explained how the battle lines are drawn. Between those of us who want the debt gone and those who want to use it as a tool of manipulation and control.
“This exactly marks the difference between Colo. Hamilton’s views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the legislature.”
Madison understood this as well. He named debt as one of the three known instruments of domination.
“Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
THE WAR MACHINE
They rob people. They destroy liberty. But, as John Taylor warned, with a national debt, the damage doesn’t end there. It’s also a massive national security threat.
“Hence it is obvious, that debt, so far from being either strength or credit, is a diminution of both; and that freedom from debt, is the only genuine source of national strength depending on revenue.”
De Tracy called it out: debt is the engine that drives and perpetuates endless wars.
“The end answered by credit is the maintenance of distant wars, that is to say their prolongation.”
Jefferson went even further. He didn’t just call paying off debt a moral duty – he spelled out the cost of ignoring it. Refuse to pay, and you guarantee bloodshed for generations.
“It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which, if acted on, would save one half the wars of the world.”
The Founders didn’t just predict these dangers – they warned, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, that public debt would destroy everything in its path. That’s why George Washington warned us to treat public credit like a loaded weapon – carefully and rarely.
“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible.”
Washington demanded discipline. Spend what’s needed to keep the peace, and prepare for danger when you must – but never waste, and never let spending become an excuse for piling up debt.
“Avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it”
But most important – never let debt pile up, and never pass it on to future generations.
“Avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”
St. George Tucker called it for what it is: a con for the well-connected – destroying liberty, bleeding the people today, and sticking generations down the line with the bill.
“Where loans are voluntarily incurred, upon the principle that public debt is a public blessing, or to serve the purposes of aggrandizing a few at the expense of the nation, in general, or of strengthening the hands of government, (or more properly those of a party grasping at power, influence and wealth,) nothing can be more dangerous to the liberty of the citizen, nor more injurious to remotest posterity, as well as to present generations.”
Thomas Jefferson didn’t call it economics. He didn’t call it policy. He called it what it is. A massive, multi-generational ripoff.
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Christian Leaders living the lifestyle of the rich and famous tell us we're living in the last days. They never cite these scriptures in their Bibles:
Go to now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.
You have heaped treasure together for THE LAST DAYS.
Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by FRAUD, cries: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord Almighty.
You have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; you have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and killed the just; and he does not resist you.
Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth, and has long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.
You also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draws close. James 5
And this in their Bibles;
These things say the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the BEGINNING of the creation of God; I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I would you were cold or hot.
So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.
Because you say, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and know not that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked....... Revelation 3
The primary victory of Zohran Mamdani and the wedding of Bezos/Sanchez happened in the same week. Together they say a great deal about how bad our situation is.
Mamdani's campaign basically was about how New York City - the 'Emerald City' of the capitalist Oz - is unaffordable for the majority of its citizens. Even though many of his proposals would not make it through any political process, that even suggesting something different for the working class of NYC was enough for the rich to proclaim they're all leaving - or to man the barricades on Wall Street (check that - they'd hire someone else to do that).
Meanwhile, Bezos' wedding apparently cost $25 million - that number is under some debate, and it's unclear if it included the costs of private airplanes and luxury housing for all his privileged guests. But the sense of entitlement and privilege reeked from even the one or two photos I was able to stomach.
That the owners live in their own privileged bubble - protected from the existence of the great unwashed or seeing them as just backdrop to their own fabulous lives, says there is no solution to the reckless spending of this criminal empire.
While Dickens was talking about London and Paris, today it's New York City and Venice, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..."
I greatly enjoyed seeing the resistance put up by Italians to Bezos taking over Venice for the day. As I understand it, the poor chap was forced to alter the location of some of his festivities. Italians, heck, Europeans on the whole, have far more class consciousness than our own befuddled citizens.
Thanks TomR... If Life for most People in the USA becomes untenable, and the USA falls into Civil Chaos... I suspect that $$$ won't be available for the Military, and the Oligarchs will flee since they are Citizens-Of-The-World... For Example, Look At What Happened In Russia...
I've read that New Zealand is one of the preferred bug-out locations for the super rich if everything falls apart up here. Even the Hobbits can't escape them.
Thanks TomR... I've also Read that NZ is one of the preferred escapes... Now the Cost-Of-Living there is driving out Middle-Class families... The Oligarchs are Parasites that Suck the Blood of others... With the World running out of Potable Water, Do WE Need Another Trump Golf-Course?...
It's my understanding that, as of a few years ago, you have to have $500,000 in the bank before NZ will even let you in. Of course, the minimum may be more now....
I don't think A.Word.A.Day (Wordsmith.org) is subscribed to Bracing Views, but just now it sent us this:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. -Frédéric Bastiat, economist and writer (30 Jun 1801-1850)
How true!
Plutarchy and Kakistocracy. America has long been a plutarchy but never has the wealth/power been so concentrated with men who care so little for the common good and certainly lacking skills at improving the nation's welfare but men but in fact loath democracy with laser focus and skills at plundering profiteering. Even in the Gilded age the wealthiest gave more thought to the common good then do the likes of Bazos Musk...What we have in America is extreme Plutarchy and Kakistocracy.
John D. Rockefeller--the original--was famed for giving away dimes to common folks if he was out in public (imagine how many bodyguards he'd have today if he condescended to be seen in public!). Back then, a dime would buy a person an entire lunch or a generous mug of beer. In my father's young adulthood (he was born 1911), a quarter would still buy a meal.
Laser focus on the wrong things and kakistocracy are how all empires have fallen.
Here's a good explanation of the deficit from economist Richard Wolff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-QROzDKi8
Bill have you read any articles on MMT. This theory if I understand it correctly states the USA lends money to writ large and writ large spebds it. It's where the money that lent goes that determines what our society looks like. Currently the loaned money goes proportionately to the MIC/Surveillance industries. But it could also go to social programs, educational programs, programs that are progressive. The loaner (our government) prints it we borrow it and do whatever with it. MMT I think states the amount of money loaned is irrelevant....its how its used that's relevant.
I need to read more about this theory but: your thoughts?
Sounds like "voodoo economics." :-) But don't ask me--I had one college course in macroeconomics more than 40 years ago.
As many of us did, using "Economics" by Paul Samuelson.
I think I understood MMT some years ago, but the details are fuzzy now. Lord Keynes is often fingered as the villain behind the notion of gov't intervention in the economy. But he only approved of very SHORT TERM stimulation in times of crisis. What we have now is called "kicking the can farther down the road." Our children, their children, and their children in turn, etc. will end up having to pay the tab for today's reckless war spending. "Funny" how little waste and inefficiency Musk's DOGE crew was able to find at the Pentagon, eh??
My thoughts are summed up by the line in the Dylan song: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Some more from Dylan: "I asked him what his name was/And how come he didn't drive a truck/He said his name was Columbus/And I just said 'Good luck!'" :-)
It's definitely not voodoo. It's about not thinking about national debt like household debt. Most people can't get their heads around that.
I've often seen it claimed that Bill Clinton achieved a balanced budget. But I believe he employed some kind of trickery, something to do with shifting future Social Security benefits from the debit to the assets side of the ledger.
I propose a 1% sales tax on all stocks, commodities and financial securities transactions. That should bring in a pretty penny.
The wealthy have been gaming the system even more than usual since the 1980s. Reagan is idolized by the wealthy because he was the one who got the US started on the massive tax shift from the wealthy to working people. The obvious way to raise revenues is to stop coddling rich people, and go back to the 90% top tax rate for people who earn too much while sitting at home relaxing. The rich rigged the system, now the problem is how to unrig it.
"So, Congress and the President do what they always do . . ."
Which is why WE THE PEOPLE need to replace the traitorous blowhards in the Executive and Legislative branches. REGIME CHANGE IN WASHINGTON DC! (Is this so difficult to grasp?)
https://warismakinguspoor.com/a-nation-at-peace/
The Tenth Amendment Center’s Michael Boldin offers this overview of America’s Founders' views on National Debt... :
NATIONAL DEBT AND THE DESTRUCTION OF LIBERTY
“I go on the principle that a Public Debt is a Public curse”
James Madison didn’t see public debt as a mere policy debate or a nuisance to be dealt with later. He saw it as one of the most dangerous threats to a representative system – one that leads straight to corruption, tyranny, war, and collapse.
He was far from alone. Again and again, leading voices from the founding generation warned that a government hooked on debt is a system headed for disaster.
The Founders understood something we’ve forgotten: debt isn’t just bad economics. It’s a weapon that destroys republics.
THE EVIL CALAMITY
During the ratification debates, the Anti-Federalist writer Brutus painted a stark picture.
“I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than to be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge.”
We’ve exceeded that threshold. By orders of magnitude.
Decades earlier, during the height of the American Revolution, James Otis, Jr. saw how Britain’s debt was crushing the colonies.
“The national debt is confessed on all hands, to be a terrible evil.”
The colonists bore the burden of an empire’s extravagance. Sound familiar?
Even after independence, President George Washington treated debt as an existential threat. In his Fifth Annual Message to Congress, he warned:
“No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt. On none can delay be more injurious or an economy of time more valuable.”
LIBERTY’S UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Tench Coxe understood the stakes: “The liberties of a people involved in debt, are as uncertain as the liberty of an individual in the same situation. Their virtue is more precarious.”
Individual debtors remain bound by law. Indebted governments seek to destroy it.
“The unfortunate citizen must yield to the operation of the laws, while a bankrupt nation too easy annihilates the sacred obligations of gratitude and honor, and becomes execrable and infamous.”
History proves him right. Thomas Gordon, in his Works of Sallust, showed how Caesar used debt to destroy the Roman Republic.
“Cæsar, besides wasting all his own Substance, ran in Debt near Two Millions of our Money, by bribing the People, and their Tribunes.”
The lesson was clear. Debt was the tool that enabled the destruction of liberty.
“Cæsar did by Bribes what his Sword, without them, never could have done, oppressed the Liberty of his Country.”
THE CORRUPTION MACHINE
John Taylor of Caroline exposed how a national debt creates a self-perpetuating system of corruption.
“A spell is put upon our understandings by the words ‘publick faith and national credit,’ which fascinates us into an opinion, that fraud, corruption and oppression, constitute national credit; and debt and slavery, publick faith.”
Taylor then revealed how debt corrupts the entire legislative process.
“A legislature, in a nation where the system of paper and patronage prevails, will be governed by that interest, and legislate in its favour.”
Once captured by creditors, legislators turn government into a jobs program for themselves and their cronies.
“Such a legislature will create unnecessary offices, that themselves or their relations may be endowed with them. They will lavish the revenue, to enrich themselves.”
Most insidious of all, they make themselves the middlemen in their own debt scheme:
“They will borrow for the nation, that they may lend. They will offer lenders great profits, that they may share in them.”
Benjamin Rush, in a letter to James Madison, laid out the true consequences of public debt:
“Nothing fundamentally unjust can ever produce happiness in its issue. It will lay the foundation of an aristocracy in our country.”
Rush warned that the debt-based system would make a mockery of every principle that built the young Republic.
“It will change the property of nine-tenths of the freeholders of the States, and it will be a lasting monument of the efficacy of idleness, speculation, and fraud above industry, economy, and integrity in obtaining wealth.”
THE FINAL STAGE
When the people finally recognize the scam, Taylor warned, the political class doesn’t surrender – it tightens the grip.
“As grievances gradually excite national discontent, they will fix the yoke more securely, by making it gradually heavier.”
But gradual oppression has limits. When the people can no longer bear the weight, when they prepare to throw off the yoke entirely, only one option remains for government.
“And they will finally avow and maintain their corruption, by establishing an irresistible standing army, not to defend the nation, but to defend a system for plundering the nation.”
The corrupt system needs fuel. And that fuel is you. Mercy Otis Warren warned where this leads.
“The artificial creation of expenses by those who deem a public debt a public blessing, will easily suggest plausible pretences for taxation, until every class is burdened to the utmost stretch of forbearance, and the great body of the people reduced to penury and slavery.”
UNLIMITED POWER
There’s no limit to how far they’ll push it. Destutt de Tracy saw exactly what happens.
“Now history teaches us that it is in fact since governments have had what is called credit, that is to say the possibility of employing in an instant the funds of several years, that they have no longer set bounds either to their prodigality, or their ambition, or their projects.”
Jefferson understood this well. Debt is the most corruptive force – worse than any external threat.
“There does not exist an engine so corruptive of the government and so demoralizing of the nation as a public debt. It will bring on us more ruin at home than all the enemies from abroad against whom this army and navy are to protect us.”
That’s why in a letter to Pres. Washington, Jefferson explained how the battle lines are drawn. Between those of us who want the debt gone and those who want to use it as a tool of manipulation and control.
“This exactly marks the difference between Colo. Hamilton’s views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the legislature.”
Madison understood this as well. He named debt as one of the three known instruments of domination.
“Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
THE WAR MACHINE
They rob people. They destroy liberty. But, as John Taylor warned, with a national debt, the damage doesn’t end there. It’s also a massive national security threat.
“Hence it is obvious, that debt, so far from being either strength or credit, is a diminution of both; and that freedom from debt, is the only genuine source of national strength depending on revenue.”
De Tracy called it out: debt is the engine that drives and perpetuates endless wars.
“The end answered by credit is the maintenance of distant wars, that is to say their prolongation.”
Jefferson went even further. He didn’t just call paying off debt a moral duty – he spelled out the cost of ignoring it. Refuse to pay, and you guarantee bloodshed for generations.
“It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which, if acted on, would save one half the wars of the world.”
THE MORAL IMPERATIVE
The Founders didn’t just predict these dangers – they warned, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, that public debt would destroy everything in its path. That’s why George Washington warned us to treat public credit like a loaded weapon – carefully and rarely.
“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible.”
Washington demanded discipline. Spend what’s needed to keep the peace, and prepare for danger when you must – but never waste, and never let spending become an excuse for piling up debt.
“Avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it”
But most important – never let debt pile up, and never pass it on to future generations.
“Avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”
St. George Tucker called it for what it is: a con for the well-connected – destroying liberty, bleeding the people today, and sticking generations down the line with the bill.
“Where loans are voluntarily incurred, upon the principle that public debt is a public blessing, or to serve the purposes of aggrandizing a few at the expense of the nation, in general, or of strengthening the hands of government, (or more properly those of a party grasping at power, influence and wealth,) nothing can be more dangerous to the liberty of the citizen, nor more injurious to remotest posterity, as well as to present generations.”
Thomas Jefferson didn’t call it economics. He didn’t call it policy. He called it what it is. A massive, multi-generational ripoff.
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Source: https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2025/06/06/national-debt-and-the-destruction-of-liberty/
Christian Leaders living the lifestyle of the rich and famous tell us we're living in the last days. They never cite these scriptures in their Bibles:
Go to now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.
You have heaped treasure together for THE LAST DAYS.
Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by FRAUD, cries: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord Almighty.
You have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; you have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and killed the just; and he does not resist you.
Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth, and has long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.
You also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draws close. James 5
And this in their Bibles;
These things say the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the BEGINNING of the creation of God; I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I would you were cold or hot.
So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.
Because you say, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and know not that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked....... Revelation 3