2011 Government Shutdown: A Dream Come True?

Federal Government Shutting Down: The United States federal government is scheduled for a 2011 shutdown as of Friday, April 8th because the Republicans and Democrats can’t seem to agree on anything concerning the budget… Big Surprise!  Government spending, at least through most of my lifetime, has been handled like an 18 year old, with no financial training and a wallet full of credit cards.

A Dream come True? Yes, in many ways the Government shutting down seems like a dream come true, but let’s look into it a little bit.  This isn’t the first time it has happened; something similar happened in 1995 during the Clinton Administration.  They couldn’t agree on a budget then either, and the federal government ended up shutting down many of its operations.

A l l   O v e r   A n   A i r p l a n e   S e a t :

My favorite part of the 1995 dispute was what Newt Gingrich had to say about it, when he told a room full of reporters that he forced the shutdown because the President made him sit in the back of Air Force One.  Apparently his airplane seat was more important than whether or not the government remained in operation.  It’s nice to know our elected officials have such a high level of maturity… I was beginning to worry.

What is different from 1995? Well, at least 2 things:

1. It isn’t about an airplane seating chart, and…
2. In 1995 our county was only kind of broke, now we are so many trillions of dollars in debt that most of us can’t even fathom how far we have spun down the spiral.  I’ll put a little bit of this into perspective:

The Current Debt Crisis: Just for fun(not that it is fun to actually see the numbers), I went to visit the National Debt Counter to see just how bad it is as of today.  We are Currently $14,265,942,733,384 in debt(approximately 14.2 Trillion Dollars).  The United States estimated population is 310,338,695(310.3 Million), making each citizen’s share about $45,969.

Everyone Counts: Yes, that counts Men Women and Children, so if you are a family of four, your portion would be just shy of $200,000.  No, you don’t personally owe that money, but that is how far this country is in the hole; it owes nearly two hundred thousand dollars for every average family; if your family is Mormon or Catholic, the figure is likely closer to $500,000.

Billions Verses Trillions: For fun, let’s look at this a little bit further; let’s discuss the difference between a Billion and a Trillion.  If you had a Billion dollars to spend, you could spend one dollar per second for the next 31.7 years. If you had a Trillion dollars, you could spend one dollar per second for the next 31,688 Years.  The United States Government is currently carrying more than 14 times that amount, or in other words 443,632 years worth of spending one dollar per second(more actually, I didn’t count two tenths of a trillion in that calculation).

The fantastic part of all of it is that the debt has ONLY been increasing an average of $4.09 Billion per day since September of 1997!  Wow, if these aren’t fun facts, I don’t know what are.

Will America Survive? There are a lot of citizens that live in this country that believe we are immune to the economic catastrophes that have destroyed so many other countries.  Simply put, we are not.  In December of 1923, just after World War 1, Germany experienced hyperinflation so bad that $1 in U.S. Currency was worth $4.2 Trillion German Marks.  I hope we aren’t anywhere near having this happen(though I wouldn’t be surprised), but let’s take our current debt load and look at it from a personal level.

If an individual buys more home than they can handle, has too big of a car payment, and has a wallet full of credit card debt, what happens?  Will banks continue to loan them more money?  How long can they borrow from one credit card to pay off another?  What happens when you stop making payments on your Home or Car?

For the sake of all of us, I hope they cut as much spending as possible so that the National Debt begins to go down, rather than up on a daily basis.  Either way, it’s time to start making some preparations to the fact that life will not be the same in the next few years as it has been in the past(kind of like today isn’t even like it was five years ago).  It has already gotten one hell of a lot worse, so what’s next?

How to Prepare: You can make a decision for yourself, but as for me, I am actively working on a plan B.  I hope the traditional system finds a balanced way to make itself work for the next thousand years, but personally, I’m not counting on it.  Watch the video below to hear a few of the things a lot of people are doing to prepare in the midst of our living nightmare:

To A Brighter Future,

Aki Wood: Renegade Madman

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P.S. As much as Anarchy is awesome in theory, it would be a total nightmare if the government completely shut down. America has managed to piss so many countries off that if they found a window where they could come and destroy it, I doubt they would flinch at the chance. Fortunately, even if it shuts down on Friday, it will likely start it’s operations again shortly.

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