Trending
Solution to national finances is simple
To the Editor:
Something new politically has come to light: several polls have identified that the economy is no longer the primary concern of the electorate. "It's the economy, stupid," no longer applies. It's the border – the illegal immigration that has already seeded many of our major cities with the beginnings of drug-based crime organizations and has brought about more and more incidents of random violence.
This is the result of the catastrophic stupidity of Biden, who opened the border simply to show that he was different from his rival Trump. And, the continuing flow of illegals simply shows that the Democratic party is complicit in his action; otherwise, they would have taken steps to override it.
Party politics have an unfortunate effect on the country, because (as above) scoring points against the other party often takes precedence over the national interest. Moreover, in any organization where subservience to the wishes of the leader is the path to future success, only the opinion of the leader matters. Thus, there are only a few opinions in Washington that matter, e.g., those of the President, the leader of the senate and the speaker of the house, rather than the independent voices of all the members of Congress. But, are the party organizations and their influence going to go away? No: the idea of two competing parties is set in stone in the national mind. Two parties give us all a team to root for to satisfy our natural competitiveness.
Therefore, the continuing drain on the national treasury accelerates. Politicians are staying in office by giving the people more money, regardless of the degree to which that contributes to the national debt. Politicians will not touch the "third rail" of politics - reductions in Medicare, Social Security or Medicaid, so now we are paying more for interest on the debt than on national defense. We are hurtling towards financial ruin. (Have you noticed how many billionaires are building bomb shelters or buying private islands?)
What to do? Let's be real. To begin with, we have to accept that the Democrats will win the presidency in 2024. They are using all their forces against Trump, and if they eliminate him, they will turn on Haley or any other Republican challenger. They have the money, they own the press and they have half the people in this country who still believe that Republicans are all greedy big businessmen. There was a poll, published the other day, that is of crucial importance to understanding today's politics. It said that Biden would win over any other Republican candidate than Trump by a significant margin. In other words, the doddering, confused and most likely incompetent Biden would be preferable to anybody labeled "Republican."
How did this come about? For one thing, the press (not without considerable truth) has presented the Democratic presidents of the last one hundred years as courageous, historically important figures - Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and so forth, while Republicans become well-meaning but trivial figures like Ford and the Bush family or villains like Hoover or Nixon. Secondly, the Democrats always promise better things through the influence of government, while Republican conservatives represent things as they are, which, for most people, are not good enough. And, lastly, but most simply, Republicans are seen as people with money and Democrats are seen as the poor little guys – a largely false narrative, but one that endures.
What should Conservatives do? OK, listen up. First, dump the losing "Republican" label; let the party disappear. Go underground. Don't vote; let the Democrats have the government. This will put them in a bind: they will either have to (1) reduce Social Security or Medicare, enraging the people, or (2) see the financial ruin of the government, destroying the edifice that they have worked so long to create and control. Their obvious choice is (1).
The Democrats, having thus stabilized government finances, can then pay more attention to foreign affairs, which need work. There is a recently-discovered enormous basin of oil off the coast of Guyana. Venezuela is threatening to invade Guyana to control this oil, which they could invite the Russians or the Chinese to develop for them, as well as restoring the shattered Venezuelan oil industry. (Biden, of course, has no idea about what to do about all this.) The solution is obvious: the US should invade and annex Venezuela, under the cover of the Monroe Doctrine. This would get rid of an obnoxious dictator, would let the US develop the oil fields, would open the tap of the new sources of world oil, reducing "prices at the pump" and threatening the economies of Russia and Iran (and strengthening the relative positions of Israel and Ukraine), and, finally, would give the obvious opportunity and reason for returning all Venezuelan illegals to their now-happy homeland.
Why does something so easy seem so difficult?
John Brittain