Our infrastructure continues to crumble -- roads, bridges, dams,
underground water and waste conduits, etc., most lacking systematic repair and
replacement strategies. We have been at war continuously for more than a decade
and war looms anew in Iran, while our forces are still engaged in Afghanistan.
Our military garrisons spanning the globe continue to drain resources needed
elsewhere, while we have yet to pay for the earlier wars spanning our history.
Despite extensive social programs, beginning in the early 20 th
Century, 7.1 million Americans are either in jail or under some form of state
and federal correctional supervision. Those are merely the most easily identifiable
contributors to the national debt -- owed at a rate of more than $136,000 per
taxpayer.
Generations of Americans have listened to the endless blather of
political candidates from all parties claiming to be fiscally conservative;
however intellectually or socially liberal they are or are not. However, there
hasn't been a fiscally conservative Congress or administration working for the
economic well-being of the nation since 1957, the last year federal spending
showed a real decline. That year the national debt inched back over a two-year
period from $274.4 billion in 1955 to $270.5 billion.
It remains a common misperception that the debt declined during
the Clinton administration, when what really declined, albeit briefly, was the
U.S. budget.
It is a plain fact that both parties have spent profligately for
the last 99 years to create our $15.4 trillion monster debt that continues to grow as wildly as
the deadliest cancer. For a quick perspective, and ignoring inflation for the
moment, the national debt that precipitated the 1913 income tax is less than
two ten-thousandths -- 0.00019 --the size of today's national debt, according
to U.S. Department of Treasury figures. Who in the 63 rd Congress
would have foreseen that? Who in the 112 th Congress is even aware
of it?
Apparently it is both the Republican and Democratic position that
government growth and spending must not be stopped and reduced. The
notion of a debt ceiling has become as laughable as it is tragic. Why pretend
to have one to begin with? Most recently the ceiling was raised from $15.2
trillion to $16.4 trillion. "Over the last two years, we've increased
discretionary spending by 24 percent -- 84 percent if you include the stimulus
monies," Former House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security
Chairman Harold Rogers (R-KY) told the committee on March 2, 2011. "We're
borrowing 42 cents on every dollar we spend." While that line has been
repeated ad nauseam in congressional testimony and media interviews, it has had
little effect on the lawmakers' borrowing habits.
Aristotle in his Ethics defined "the liberal man"
as "the one who spends in proportion to his means." By that
definition liberals have been a rarity in American politics since 1835 despite
the overwhelming control
of Congress by Democrats in the last century.
Debt managed and nearly paid off
The birth of the United States was an expensive proposition. In
fact, the nation's formation and the establishment of a new government resulted
in a national debt of $75.5 million at the beginning of 1791. However, a
succession of able presidents and congresses reduced that by more than 40
percent to $45.2 million prior to the onset of the War of 1812 against England.
In the walk-up to that war -- unlike as in many of our most recent wars
--considerable thought was given in advance about how to pay for the conflict.
"A loan bill for eleven millions at six per cent was easily passed,"
wrote historian Henry Adams in the 1880s, "but all the force of the war
feeling could not overcome the antipathy to taxation," which was not
seriously considered as an option for the war's funding.
The war ended in 1815, and as of Jan. 1, 1816, it had contributed
to pushing the national debt to new heights, this time $127.3 million. Again,
however, a succession of fiscally responsible presidents and congresses worked
industriously for the common wealth and without the aid of an income tax. They
reduced the national debt in 18 of the following 19 years, and consecutively
for 13 years -- the longest debt reduction streak in U.S. history -- so that by
1835, they paid down the national debt to $33,733.05, its lowest point ever.
The cost of war
However, after the prosperity of the 1820s and 1830s, tight
management of the budget and the debt began to unravel. The debt rose and fell,
but mostly rose -- and precipitously so with the 1847-1848 war with Mexico.
Prior to the Mexican war, the national debt in 1846 stood at $15.6 million. In
the first year of the war, 1847, it more than doubled to $38.8 million. The war
ended the following year, and by Jan. 1, 1849, the debt had quadrupled to $63.1
million.
The most dramatic change in the debt occurred during the American
Civil War when the debt exploded from a mere $64.8 million in 1860 to $2.8
billion in by July 1, 1866 -- a 42.8-fold increase. There the debt hovered for
the next 46 years despite 21 years in which the Treasury Department shows a
reduction.
It's a coin toss over which war marked the point of no return on a
pay-down of the national debt and fiscal responsibility. (In fact, because it
was never fully paid off, some portion of the current debt stems from the
unpaid portion of the 1776 revolution.)
The income tax
Congress imposed an income tax for the first time in U.S. history
during the American Civil War. Initially it was a tax of three percent on
incomes above $800 per year. Congress increased it in 1862 and 1865, when
incomes between $600 and $5,000 were taxed at five percent and incomes of
$5,000 and above were taxed at 10 percent. Before the tax was abolished in
1872, it had raised an impressive $347 million. The income tax was attempted
again in 1894, but the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust
Company in 1895 declared the two-percent tax on incomes over $4,000 to be
unconstitutional.
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