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We’ve All Been Thrown Under the Omnibus
This latest omnibus spending package is just one more nail in the coffin of the American way of life. Forget about the details. The good news is six months from now, this will all fade, like trying to remember a nightmare a half hour after you wake up. Has anyone been talking about the Deficit Reduction Act lately?
I’m a simple man. I need to wrap my head around these figures with some simple math. Any small business owner has one thing in common. You need to control the money flow. The first thing I noticed when trying to crunch these federal dollars is online mortgage calculators can’t handle all those zeros. So, all my numbers will only be in billions because any dollar on the federal level, less than a billion, is insignificant.
The feds and all the talking heads love to muddy the waters, not only with such large numbers, but also confusing funding vs. revenue, borrowing, smoke and mirrors, etc. What it comes down to is every dollar spent needs to be paid by an American citizen at some point. The straight up taxes are obvious. Our unseen contributions come from every corporation that must pass the cost down to the consumer, otherwise, why be in business if you can’t make money? For instance, I program drinking water systems. My costs and fees have gone up. Your water bill will go up proportionally to match.
Because some of these bills are spread over years, don’t forget we are still paying for previous years and the future will pay for this year.
Congress loves to separate mandatory spending vs. discretionary spending. I don’t know anyone that contributes very much to discretionary taxes. Well, outside of my wife’s occasional scratch ticket. It’s okay because whenever she buys one and tells me, she wins. There is only one balance that counts. How much money went out.
One overlooked fact is that there is no debt ceiling and there is no budget. Instead of a debt ceiling, it should be called a 
debt elevator. A budget that has a deficit every year is an insane, unrealistic, fictitious, so-called budget! It reminds me of the bald kid in the Matrix, “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth … There is no spoon.”
The population of the United States is 0.333 billion people. According to CNBC, 61% of Americans pay no federal taxes bringing the contributing population down to 0.13 billion people. The 2022 spending is $6,600B. Just for 2022, we all need to contribute $50,769.23 without interest ($0.000051B).
There is definitely interest owed on this money. $6,600B minus $3,400B revenue equals $3,200B borrowed or printed. Let’s just use conservative estimates of 3% over 30 years would equal $1,657B in interest giving us taxpayers a total debt for this year alone of $63,515.38 each.
If you add your 2022 federal taxes along with all your inflated costs contributing to federal revenue, how much of that pays off your $63,000 tax burden? I’m sure most of us have not reached that threshold.
Compared to previous years this $63k per person is high. It is my guess, in future years, it will be low. There will come a time when we can no longer service the interest on these loans. A further watering down of our currency is inevitable. Our 401k’s have already lost half their buying power with inflation and lost returns. We are on a straight path to becoming Venezuela. It’s only a matter of time.
Published in General
“The last official act of any government is to loot the treasury.” – George Washington
Its a sobering thought to realize that if I’m lucky, I’ll be dead by then. Now, the kids and grand-kids – that’s a worry.
Unspoken, but I was thinking that too.
It’s a miracle.
Great post!
Somewhat OT, my father was for a time an entrepreneur, travelling salesman, and architect of municipal utility billing systems. He consulted, sold and installed, programmed and maintained billing systems for several towns and counties in New Mexico and Arizona. He had two Durango F-85 machines at home, and carried (exciting new) 5-inch floppies back and forth as needed to exchange data and updates with machines installed at customer sites. This required his massive Chrysler or a private plane. Not exactly “portable”, as he also needed two 50-pound cases of manuals and greenbar printouts. And sometimes offspring.
I wrote my first truly useful program at age eleven or so (not sure) to print “hex paper” on the back of greenbar 17 for playing RPGs.
In occasional flashes of optimism, I like to think that it might have been better if this Omnibus hadn’t passed.
But the rest of the time, I think that we’ve passed the point of this making a difference. And we passed that point years ago.
But, as I often say, I really hope I’m wrong about this.
Indeed. Afghani-what?
Is that true? Is it false?
I think that these are important points of conflict in the war of ideas with the progressivists. I also think that, although they appear at first glance to be simple, both are extremely difficult questions, requiring a high level of
Yes, although we may steal and kill to get our hands on the repayment. Economically, it’s the same.
Even though I have greatly oversimplified here I stand by my opinion that it’s true. If the socialists had every one of their dreams come true with free health care, and free college tuition, it still wouldn’t be free. There would just be a smaller pool of people contributing to a larger portion of the pot. If ‘big-oil’ had to pay double because they are evil, they would just charge double. And, yes, the liberals will still be paying, just not directly. Their real goal is a game of ratios not totals.
To your point, you can’t rationally compete with dreamy ideals.
And just what are we getting for all this extra spending? I would be interested in knowing what the amount of federal spending was per capita in 2000 compared to today and adjusted for inflation. Show of hands, how many people here feel like their life is better today than it was 22 years ago, thanks to increased spending by the federal government?
This is a brilliant point. Republicans should put this on every billboard in America.
Depending on what the numbers were, yes. I expect that it is a huge gap, but don’t know. The billboard could be three lines:
Federal spending per citizen in 2000: $___
Federal spending per citizen in 2022: $___
Have you felt an improvement in your life because of it?
A favorite album in my childhood:
Just last week Rand Paul said if they had passed the 2019 spending plan instead of this bill, it would have been a balanced budget.
“It’s the spending, stupid.”
That’s amazing.
I remember Aristotle Cookie!
Great Post!
Love bringing the argument down to how much each of us who actually pay taxes really pay to the guvmunt.
As details emerge of the magic Omni-bus out of the haze it appears our betters in Congress raised spending in the end a mere $1.5 trillion on top of the official $1.38 trillion 2022 deficit, all the while knowing full well that revenue this year was going to take a big ugly stinky dump and that debt service was going to rise by several hundred billion driving the 2023 deficit far north of $3 Trillion which we can’t come close to paying for.
No amount of Bidenista/Jay Powell/ Alphabet Media/ Google-Apple-Facebook shuck and jive can cover up this monstrous, monumental looming financial crises which has made another multi-trillion Jay Powell money print very hazardous in the wake of several previous trillion dollars money prints that have driven inflation through the roof.
There was a most simple solution to this entire mess, known as Executive Order 1110, which was delivered by Pres John F Kennedy on June 4th 1963.
Many think this executive order was a contributing factor in what happened on Nov 22nd of the same year.
When Kennedy signed this Order, it returned to the federal government, specifically the Treasury Department, the Constitutional power to create and issue currency- money without going through the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank.
Abolish the Fed and there won’t be the interest being paid on the monies that Congress is always willing to borrow. The monies needed would be handled by the US Treasury. Then the privately owned Fed Reserve would have to go elsewhere for its cabal-related profits.
Also, starting in March 2020, one of the most expensive programs in the nation’s history was approved by many fear-induced Dems and Republicans. The media said “Ooga booga Killer Pandemic!” for two months and those people unable to uncover the many proclamations of what a fraud this program was instead went into all out full fear mode.
This fearful mode that our citizenry descended into has allowed our government to print money overtime, pay interest on the printing, and then enable Fed Government bureaucrats to withhold the cheap, available and effective remedies for the Killer Pandemic.
The result was that many American citizens died from the COV virus who would have lived, had they been born in Japan, Turkey or any part of the continent of Africa.
But with so many deaths being reported, many oblivious Americans then went on to accept risky and ineffective vaccines and boosters. The total cost of all the crap the government has insisted upon for this molehill of a virus that they turned into a mountain will be almost unimaginable.
It will be well over the 6 Trillion the “America Cares Acts” required and perhaps as much as 17 trillion. (And this cost does not reflect the loss of tax payer revenues from those who died from COVID, those who committed suicide as their lives became hell under COVID restrictions, and the coming millions who will become injured or corpses after taking the experimental injections.)
I wish I had written that headline. . .
Great post, although not exactly encouraging. If it helps, I think the fiscal issues are the least of our problems.
But those fiscal issues can be the starting point/cause of many others.
I wish it were that simple.
It is at best misleading to say that the Constitution gave the Treasury the power to create money. It is equally misleading to say that the Fed is privately owned.
Nah, it’s the radical secular individualism and lack of a more homogenous (faith-based) value system. I drove past some of the human detritus on the way home from church today in my neighborhood (and I say that in mourning, not criticism). A couple surrounded by six law enforcement officers. He covered in tats, with dreadlocks and an unkempt beard, she looking thin and forlorn and downcast. I think they’ve been living in a pickup parked along the street with pagan icons loaded in the bed, like a skeletal horsehead and Tibetan prayer flags. Lost souls. I wonder if they have family. If they’ve ever had caring parents.
And this isn’t even accounting for the mass murder of pre-born babies and the “medical professionals” willing to engage in the evil, or the chemical and/or surgical mutilation of mentally troubled children. . . When society is no longer civil — and ours isn’t — fiscal irresponsibility is the least of our problems.
I agree that a financial crisis may be the impetus to turn things around (suffering, in general), but the root of our decline is Godlessness and a lack of agreement about morals.
That’s another perspective, and it can go either way, but I think a lot of people are in desperation, and seeking “answers” from various dark places and even government, because the financial shenanigans at the upper echelons make it increasingly difficult for many “average” people to afford food, housing, children… In that sense, the secularization of those upper echelons is the origin, and it flows downhill, but the “average” people didn’t start it.
Not only the question you ask about “their lives being better today than it was 22 years ago” but I’d ask what ‘needs’ ($$) are being met today that warrant these expenditures that weren’t being met 22 years ago? The government was too big 22 years ago, 40 years ago.
It cost a lot of money to tear statues down and delete 200 years of history. We weren’t doing that 22 years ago.
$800 billion of the $1.7 trillion was military spending. What would you cut there? You can’t be the global hegemon (or aspire to be) and have a small government. Pornographic omnibus bills are an outgrowth.
The thing that conservatives don’t express is that as the government’s share of GDP has grown over time, the growth in future prosperity has decreased. This is in spite of depressions and wars.
I’m fine with cutting military spending. Let’s sjust please have a policy thatg mathces. Stop policing everything and patrolling everywhere. Instead, announce that anybody who hinders our legit trade or threatens our borders will get exactly one warning and then will be made to pay an eye-watering price.
A policy like that will bring military costs down quickly, even if we do wind up taking a pound of flesh from time to time.
https://ricochet.com/290130/cut-defense-and-how/
Remember when McConnell promised to get back to regular order for budget processing? Now the omnibus has become regular order.
I don’t know enough to say that we should cut this weapons program, close that base, etc. But it sounds like we spend more than any other country in the world in defense, and we spend more than the next half-dozen or so big spenders combined. So there’s got to be room to cut somewhere.