America the Bankrupt, In More Ways Than Money

"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker in Final Accounting in the Estate of A. B. (1866)

That pithy quotation borrowed by Mark Twain has been proved with real force once again, courtesy of the recent $1.1 trillion dollar spending bill from Congress. Here are a few horrific highlights:

"The 1,000-plus-page bill brings together six of the 12 annual spending bills that Congress had been unable to pass separately because of partisan roadblocks even though the current budget year began Oct. 1. [emphasis added]
...
"The bill increases spending by an average of about 10 percent to programs under immediate control of Congress, blending increases for veterans' programs, NASA and the FBI with a pay raise for federal workers and help for car dealers." [emphasis added]

The legislation also:

Includes an improved binding arbitration process to challenge the decision by General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC to close more than 2,000 dealerships.

Renews a federal loan guarantee program for steel companies. [And,]

Calls for federal worker pay increases averaging 2 percent."

Equally disturbing,

"First, while most people have focused on health care and cap-and-trade, discretionary spending has leaped by 25 percent since the Democrats took the Congressional majority three years ago — plus $311 billion in additional 'stimulus' discretionary spending.

This comes to $561 billion more in discretionary spending over these three years than if they had limited growth to the baseline inflation rate.

Worse, this new spending has pushed the 2011–2020 discretionary spending baseline $1.7 trillion higher than three years ago."

And all this while the spotlight is on so-called health care reform that is carried out behind doors closed even to all but a handful in Congress.

A Congress that ignores the will of its constituents while spending them into ruin, an Executive who cheers them on and calls for ever more spending more than a year into a severe economic downturn, and a Supreme Court that does literally nothing about any of it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is dictatorship 21st century America-style, about a generation away from becoming it 1920s Italian style.