Mr. Dan Lux
As "The BEC's Guest" We Welcome Back The Candidate for U.S. House District 2
Making a powerful case to earn your vote, Dan Lux returns to The BEC with this guest piece as his campaign moves into the home stretch against Troy Carter (D) in the November 8th election. Please read our earlier interview with the candidate here, and give a glance to the remarkable two minute video below before you read Dan’s piece. The reason will become very clear…
The Federal Government -vs- Einstein
by Dan Lux
Does the Federal Government have a spending problem? Ask any ordinary American and you’ll undoubtedly get a definitive answer, “Absolutely!” But do they realize the extent to which the government is spending our future into oblivion?
We’re bombarded daily with news about endless government spending on all sorts of domestic and foreign programs. The spending never stops.
Where does all this money come from?
When the government doesn’t collect enough in tax revenues to cover its unrestrained spending, it must borrow to cover the deficit. The borrowed money then gets added to the national debt. The printing of new money expands the money supply and fuels inflation. One trip to the grocery store and you’ll quickly realize that we’ve been printing a LOT of money.
The bottomless pit of spending by the federal government has become mind numbing. The dollar figures being spent in the hundreds of millions, tens of billions, and even in the trillions are so large they have very little meaning to ordinary people. Most have no real-world way to relate to what a trillion of anything is.
Here’s a simple example to help put a trillion dollars into context.
If you were to spend $1 a second, non-stop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, how long would it take you to spend $1 trillion? Make a guess off the top of your head… a week, a month, 6 months… a year??? Well, it would take you 32,000 years to get through that trillion-dollar pile of cash!
Human civilization has only been around for roughly 6,000 years. Now, that’s only 1 trillion; our national debt has just crossed the $31 trillion mark.
$31,000,000,000,000
So, let’s examine the national debt, along with our government’s uncontrolled spending to get a real-world understanding of just how unsustainable it is. Below is a table showing the 2021 and 2022 federal budgets. From it, you can see the government spends about $6 trillion a year, but only generates about $4 trillion in tax revenue, creating roughly a $2 trillion deficit.
Federal Budget - '21: $6.8T / '22: $6.0T Tax Revenue - '21: $4.0T / '22: $4.2T Deficit - '21: $2.8T / '22: $1.8T Annual Interest - '21: $400B / '22: $410B
By now you’re probably wondering how Albert Einstein fits into all of this. One of the greatest minds in the past century, if not of all human existence, Einstein gave us the Theory of Relativity which tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, at 670 million miles per hour, which means it can circumnavigate Earth 7.5 times in one second. Light travels so fast we use its speed to measure the vast expanses between galaxies, called a light year. In one year, light travels 5.8 trillion miles. Now remember, Einstein has told us that nothing travels faster than light.
Then along came our unrestrained politicians who greedily found a way to violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The government now spends over 6 trillion dollars a year, spending money faster than light can travel in 1 year, violating Einstein’s Theory of Relativity! What we need now is a Theory of REALITY. Because spending at this rate is unsustainable.
Again, these are numbers so large they have no real-world relevance to the average person, so let’s put it all into a relatable context. The first thing we’ll do is remove 8 zeroes from these numbers, and then apply the figures to a family living beyond their means.
Drawing from 2022 Federal numbers, it would equate to a family earning $42,000 a year and having $310,000 of credit card debt. They are paying $4,100 a year in credit card interest, and continue to live beyond their means spending $60,000, adding $18,000 a year they don’t have to their credit card debt.
When put into these terms you can easily understand just how irresponsible this family is being with their finances. This is what our government is doing.
Every time Congress increases the debt ceiling it’s like this irresponsible family is calling the credit card companies and asking to raise their credit limits. We are beyond the point of it being unsustainable, and have reached a place where it is so irresponsible it has put us on the brink of financial collapse.
Consider this. In 1980, the Debt to GDP Ratio was only 34.5%. By 2000 it had increased to 58%. Today, the Debt to GDP Ratio is 125%.
Our debt surpasses the GDP of the entire country. Some European nations have suffered debt crises with lower Debt to GDP Ratios and needed to be bailed out by other European countries. That can be done with smaller economies like Greece and Portugal, but what entity has the financial scale to bail out the U.S.?
Now, if your blood isn’t boiling, hang tight, I’m about to turn up the heat.
Recently the brilliant minds in the federal government passed The Inflation Reduction Act with $740 billion in spending that we’re told will reduce inflation. Why should we doubt this when it’s right there in the name of the Act?? The most generous estimate given by the Congressional Budget Office is that the act will reduce the deficit by $100 billion over 10 years. That works out to $10 billion a year.
Remember: the Biden administration had a party on the White House lawn over this achievement.
Let’s now unravel this word salad and apply it to our fictional family earning $42,000 with $310,000 in credit card debt and spending $60,000 a year.
In this family, the father comes up with a great plan to reduce the family debt. He’s announced he is going to spend an additional $7,400 dollars they don’t have and in exchange the family will save $100 a year! Then goes on to celebrate his masterful plan with a party on the front lawn!
This in fact equates to what the government is trying to sell to us. And it works since most people simply don’t relate to the figures being tossed about.
Still not enough to get you hopping mad? I’m sure this will do it.
Prior to The Inflation Reduction Act getting passed, two different historical records were set in America:
1) The number of illegal border crossings hit a record high of 1.85M 2) The amount of money the federal government collected in the first 7 months also hit a record high, of nearly $3T!
Now, knowing these two events, if you were in Congress which do you think deserved more of America’s resources?
Well, as part of The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democratic leadership elected to pour out $80 billion to hire an additional 87,000 IRS agents, and not a penny to beef up border patrol!
It’s time to show Troy Carter the door.
The BEC thanks Dan Lux for both his candidacy and his contribution to this community.
Learn more about Dan and offer your support at the campaign website!