In other words, if we all paid equally for the burden of government on a per-household basis, the average household would owe the government nearly 100% of what it brings in. Obviously, if everyone had to pay these taxes... if everyone had to share equally in the burden of the government... then none of this spending would have happened. None of these debts would have accrued. And we would have never ended up in this position. Politics masks these costs for the individual, who believes he won’t have to pay. He thinks he can simply vote... and make people like me pay. But what he doesn’t understand – and never will – is that the politics can’t change economics. Our economy can’t afford our government. Our economy can’t afford these debts – or even the debt service at any legitimate interest rate. At some point very soon, this economic reality will overwhelm the political charade. That’s why I don’t vote.
My friends... that’s pure insanity. That’s why every time there’s a committee of one kind or another that’s tasked with solving our government’s giant fiscal problems, it always comes back with nothing. No one in Washington wants to admit how much trouble we’re in. There’s no way to fix the system. The hole is far, far too deep. No government can survive long when it spends more than twice what it collects in tax revenue. Not even when it holds the world’s reserve currency and has the world’s most powerful armed forces. Just ask the Romans. Yes, I know, the feds also collect about $225 billion in corporate taxes, but that doesn’t change the math in any material way. And yes, I know all about the payroll taxes that support Medicare and Social Security. But you can’t count those funds against the current spending because all that money ought to be going toward the future obligations of those programs. The problem is that our political process – where the masses are allowed to vote themselves nearly unlimited benefits – masks the underlying economics. While any given individual might not have to suffer these burdens, everyone lives within the same economic sphere. We, as a nation, have a limited amount of economic power. We have a limited amount of opportunity. We have a limited amount of credit (believe it or not). And right now, the government is taking up a huge amount of these economic assets, an amount that can’t possibly be sustained. Spending $4.4 billion a year comes out to about $40,000 per household in the U.S.
Porter Stansberry founded Stansberry Research in 1999 working on a borrowed computer at his kitchen table. Since then, he has built the firm’s flagship newsletter, Stansberry’s Investment Advisory , into one of the industry’s most widely read publications. Today, Porter is well-known for doing some of the most important – and often controversial – work in the financial advisory business.
40 October 2018
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