Gold-stater comment on gold and The Budget Debates Mon Feb 21, 2001

Debt, both worldwide and US, is the number one reason gold is in an inexorable uptrend. In the history of the world, sovereign debt has never been repaid. It is rolled over, renegotiated, and inflated away. Or simply repudiated.

Why is the current struggle to get the National debt under control such a joke? Because the most fiscally aggressive group, the Tea Party, wants to be fiscally responsible with less the 10 percent of the budget. Republicans and Democrats want far less than that.

What won't the Tea Party, et alii, touch? Defense, Medicaire, Medicaid, Social Security. These comprise 60 percent of the budget. They want to get tough on entitlements. Just not their entitlements.

They also don't want to touch: Verterans Affairs, Homeland Security, State Programs (in their own states), and Energy.programs (In their own states).

So what will they cut? Education and Housing which comprised 200 billion dollars in a 3.7 trillion dollar budget.

To give you an idea how little this will effect the budget consider this: Starting in 2014, net interest payments will surpass the amount spent on education, transportation, energy and all other discretionary programs outside defense. In 2018, they will outstrip Medicare spending. Only the amounts spent on defense and Social Security would remain bigger.

Let's be clear, even if you took out all those horrible greedy teachers who are destroying our budget, and chained them ankle to ankle and forced them to teach our children for the price of a dry cracker and a glass of water a day, you wouldn't make the tiniest dent in our budget deficit.

Not that we can't have a reasonable discussion about the absurdly wasteful fiscal policies of public education's ensconced bureaucracy. And we certainly have to get the bloated federal pension system under control. But let's not pretend that teacher pay has much to do with the national budget.

Further, you have to wonder: From where does the current "Conservative" animosity towards Education derive? There was a time, not so long ago, when conservatives prided themselves on a first rate education. Remember William F. Buckely? But now, in a sad sign of the times, a host of top "Conservative" opinion makers never earned so much as an undergraduate degree (you know who I mean), and they wear their lack of education as some sort of badge of courage. These opinion makers continually bash the rest of us who bothered to get an education. They use phrases like Ivy League and PHD's, as if they were saying Crack Heads and Terrorists. And since when is "elite" a term of villification? Could you imagine defunding the Marines because they are an elite fighting force? Wouldn't you just die of embarrassment to have a bunch of elite athletes represent our country in the next Olympics? It would be so much better to be represented by a group of fatties who never so much as bothered to stretch their legs: good solid regular folk.

Only in government and political punditry do we strive to denigrate excellence. Let me suggest that excellence is not the problem of our moribund political system and its attendant parasite class of pundits and commentators.

Partisan Politicians - and their media mouthpieces in both parties - care for nothing but the preservation of their own personal power. We all know that. But as long as they spend their time bickering over fiscal irrelevancies like Teacher Pay, the budget will continue to spiral out of control, and gold will continue to rise.