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No $$$, No Sense
The National Center of Disease Control Update (5/22/02) quotes the Washington Post (5/22/02), in an article by Ceci Connolly, "The lack of health insurance in America leads to delayed diagnoses, life-threatening complications and, ultimately, 18,000 premature deaths each year." A study by the Institute of Medicine commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences found that "being uninsured for even a year appears to diminish a person's general health." There are nearly 40 million uninsured Americans. "Nearly 85 percent of uninsured adults work or live in a family where someone works."
What kind of country ignores almost forty million of its working citizens? What kind of country allows people to go without standard medical help until they collapse with a serious illness and are flung upon the taxpayer for big bucks? What is the sense of saving a penny and spending a pound? Does this country have a rational fiscal and medical outlook? No, it does not. America has no brain and no heart. Here the dollar is connected to the political process, especially the Gay Lobby. They get fortunes, and there is nothing left for others.
One would think that the prospect of 18,000 pre-mature deaths a year for hard-working Americans would arouse people. However, nobody cares. The noise is about the global AIDS epidemic. While utterly ignoring the 40 million Americans who are suffering and dying because they can't afford medical care, the American government is involved with supporting the UN's global war on AIDS. The CDC Update quotes the Associated Press (06.13.02)::E. M. Lederer that Clinton is asking for 2.4 billion dollars for foreign AID projects. Thousands of elderly and indigent Americans have no money to pay for their medications. Can we ignore them and spend 2.4 billion dollars out of the country? These elderly people worked hard and paid taxes, and now, in their distress, we ignore them. We don't ignore the Gay Lobby.
There are less than a million Americans with HIV/AIDS, but the CDC update quotes the Associated Press (6.12.02)::Paul Recer that "an estimated 4 million Americans" are infected with cancer-causing Hepatitis C, a disease that spreads much faster than HIV/AIDS. There is no outcry about those poor 4 million people, only about the less than a million people with HIV/AIDS. Billions go for gays; the poor, the elderly, and those with the major diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, are left behind. As a result, people get a dangerous liver disease that is easily spread by drug use, sex, blood transfusions, or even from a mother to a baby. Eventually, these desperately ill people come to the hospital, and the taxpayer is stuck with them.
America is not a rich country. It owes six trillion dollars, and pays interest, only interest, of almost four hundred billion dollars a year. Four hundred billion dollars is more than the entire military budget. For the past decade, the interest payments increased almost every year. This process that can only end in national bankruptcy. America spent 1.8 trillion this year but earned only 1.2 trillion. In April, it raised the debt limit in order to borrow an additional 750 billion dollars. We are in desperate financial shape, yet we spend money that we don't have, and we spend it on the Gay Lobby and international medical problems, not on our elderly, our sick, our uninsured and those who need cures for heart conditions and cancer.
Washington Post columnist David Broder, in a column States in Fiscal Crisis on May 22, 2002, showed just how desperate the states are, and how medical costs cannot be met in our present state. "Overall (state) spending rose only 2 percent in fiscal 2002; next year it is expected to increase only 1.4 percent. That does not begin to cover the costs of inflation and population growth. But the overall figure conceals a horrendous statistic: Medicaid spending rose 13.4 percent between 2001 and 2002, as part of a national explosion of health care costs, for which Washington is offering no solutions. That Medicaid runaway is threatening everything else in state budgets, including education, transportation and aid to local governments." Mr. Broder quotes the National Governor's Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers report that "state budgets are in the worst fix in 20 years." Mr. Broder writes that the states had hoped that the Federal Government would raise its support of Medicaid by 1 percent, but the government refused.
What is the prognosis for the future? In April 2001, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted that today we have a national debt of about 6 trillion dollars. However, he added, we also have a looming obligation to pay out social security to those now working who will retire. In a few years, this debt, now contingent, will actualize to the tune of 10 trillion dollars! If we are paying almost four billion dollars a year just for interest on 6 trillion dollars, how much will we pay when the national debt is raised to 16 trillion dollars? How will the states pay for the exploding populations and medical costs? Who will support the federal government's obligations? You will. You will because you live in a country without dollars and without sense.
I am not sure that Mr. Greenspan's fears will materialize. I am not sure that the government will pay out 10 trillion dollars in social security. How could it? Even today with a "small" 6 trillion dollar national debt, the government cannot survive without constantly raising the debt ceiling and paying huge interest payments. It cannot pay its bills. It must borrow. People are willing to lend America money now because the debt of 6 trillion is somehow related to the national income of 1.2 trillion. Will anyone lend us money when our debt is 16 trillion and our income is only 1.2 trillion? Who will lend huge monies to a country that does not support its states, its sick, its elderly and its uninsured?
The important thing, back at the political ranch, is the fight against AIDS. The Gay Lobby wants more money. It wants to destroy the world like it destroyed America. Without the Gay Lobby, there would be no HIV in America, because conventional medicine could have stopped the epidemic. The Gay Lobby introduced laws to forbid doctors from telling who had AIDS and stopping the epidemic. Former President Clinton just noted that AIDS would come to India and slice through "like a knife through hot butter." Of course, it will, because when years ago, India's medical services wanted to stop AIDS by going after the group that was spreading it, the homosexuals, the U.N. intervened. It called for a "more integrated approach." Don't apply conventional epidemiological tactics such as reporting partners, said the UN. Rather allow the infected people to infect all they want, and then give gay groups money to "educate" other gays about "safe sex," as if there is such a thing among people who sleep with fifteen partners in one night. When India flames up in a hideous disease, the UN piously comes forward and demands ten billion dollars, as if that is going to stop the disease without proper medical intervention. Ten billion dollars will pay for medications that won't be used properly and will end up producing worse strains of AIDS that medicine cannot stop. Condoms and the televised messages to use them will be used to stop AIDS, but once the gays feel that medicine has arrived they stop using condoms, as we found out in America. So why spend the money in the first place?
The United States spent its national treasure and blood to save England and France from Germany in World War I and World War II. Since then America protected the Free World by spending billions of dollars in armaments, and investing billions of dollars in the Marshal Plan development of France and Germany. American investment and energies powered up the Japanese, Chinese and now the Russians. Some of these countries vote in the UN against American interests, and are obviously aimed at lowering our position in the world. They invest their monies and energies in powering their economies, content that America will spend its treasure and blood on military matters. Let them pay for the global war on AIDS. It is time for America to steady its house, before those who smiled when we gave them free money and investment dictate the terms of their loans and high interest rates to us with a frown.
Mr. Greenspan warned of a huge increase in the national debt. Interest of 5% on 16 trillion dollars is .8 trillion dollars. If we continue raising the debt ceiling, as we did this year in April, by .75 billion dollars, our debt will soon be 20 trillion dollars. By then, our financial situation will be so poor that people won't lend us trillions of dollars for a mere five percent. If they ask for ten percent we will have no choice but to pay it or to declare bankruptcy and not pay social security. How much is ten percent of 20 trillion dollars? It is 2 trillion dollars. This comes out to around $7,000 a person in America, including babies, retired people and the infirm. The taxpayers will be paying, just for interest, a substantial part of their annual income. And none of this addresses the problem of how to pay for medical costs. In the future, medical costs will rise, because new medicines and technology are always more expensive than the old ones.
Of course, there is always hope that the economy will just sail away and solve our problems. However, even in the flush years of the Clinton administration, we only reduced the national debt by pennies. As the economy waxes and wanes, we see no hope for a major increase in national earnings that can offset the present prognosis.
In a May 29, 2002 column in the New York Times, Harvard economist Paul Krugman, a former member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, writes, in his article Where's the Boom? that he sees no reason for an economic recovery, and that any comparison with the Reagan recovery and today are mistaken. There is nothing out there to pump things up. He then discusses another economic factor, foreign investment in America. He quotes Barton Biggs of Morgan Stanley that Americans now suffer from a "fall from grace" in the eyes of foreigners. This, says Krugman, accounts for the fact that, "Foreign purchases of U.S. stocks, foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies, are way off." Krugman notes, "Foreigners have been wildly enthusiastic about America for years - an attitude we have come to count on, because we need $1.2 billion in capital inflows every day to cover our foreign-trade deficit. What happens as they lose their enthusiasm?"
Incredibly, this country just squandered a huge surplus. Yet, it is so poor that it must allow its citizens to die of disease. It faces the prospect of rising interest rates on debts in the trillions that cannot be sustained. First we have saved our national pet programs and ridiculous expenditures by letting 18,000 Americans die prematurely each year, because we don't provide them health insurance and care. Next, we allow our states to stagger under increasing financial burdens that cannot be sustained without cutting basic services. Are those of us hoping to retire, next? Our only hope is to know that when we borrow six trillion dollars, and will soon be needing at least 16 trillion, and probably 20 trillion, we cannot support the global war on AIDS without collapsing.
There are wars ahead of us, like them or not. We have to maintain our military might and cleanse the world of dirty-bomb suiciders. Only by realizing how poor we are is there hope. Are we really poor?
We are the richest of all countries; perhaps nobody ever had our power. And yet, we give away our strength and destroy ourselves. We build China by buying her products, produced by slaves who die of overwork for pennies. We then make wars against those supported by China and her advanced technology. We spend fortunes in offsetting the Chinese efforts against Taiwan, and may even end up in a shooting war with China. We allow our national industry to go global and ignore us. Any American company can open an office in the Bermudas and no longer pay American taxes on international dealings. Any American company can go to an Asian slave state and set up business for pennies while people back in the states have no jobs, and our government encourages this. China was just given Most Favored Nation status, even while it murdered people, imprisoned religious people and armed terrorists.
The United Nations kicked America off the human rights commission and put Sudan, a country of murders, there instead. Those who voted for this are thriving today because of American money and blood. Where would the UN be without America? What is the UN doing today to America?
Our state department and commercial interests are so sensitive to the haters, the mass murderers and terrorists. They want friends. Maybe it is time for those of us who are not important in Washington to raise our voices. We cannot be friends with those who ignore
our sick and suffering. We cannot remain silent while people in Washington ruin
our hopes for retirement.