Bill Bonner says a lot of the same things SLL does, which is why he’s sometimes featured on SLL. Debt is a tsunami rolling toward the US and global economy, and the more warnings that are sounded, the better. From Bill Bonner, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
Debt Disaster Coming!
In the 1970s, after President Nixon changed the world’s monetary system, your editor was deeply involved in a quixotic, but remarkable, effort to stop the US government from wrecking the country.
After Nixon cut the last link between the dollar and gold – the saving grace of every monetary system since Hammurabi – your editor saw the handwriting on the wall. It said: Debt Disaster Coming!
As director of the National Taxpayers Union, he worked on two major initiatives to stop this disaster from occurring. One was an amendment to the US Constitution. The “Balanced Budget Amendment” would have blocked the feds from running deficits except in times of war or national emergency.
Thirty-two states approved the amendment – two short of those needed to implement it. (Now we see how easily the feds could have gotten around this amendment anyway: We have a state of war all the time!)
The other effort was a lawsuit. On behalf of America’s children, we sued the US government in Bonner v. Baker. The “Baker” was James Baker, who at that time was the US secretary of the Treasury.
National debt was a tax on future generations, we argued. Laying on this sort of inter-generational obligation amounted to taxation without representation and should be banned. The court threw out our suit.
How the GOP Went to the Dark Side
It was while we were thus engaged in protecting the republic that Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election. We went to his inauguration and celebrated; it appeared that the battle had been won, neither in the courts nor in the states, but in the national election.
Somehow, and against all odds, Reagan was a fiscal conservative. He would restore order to America’s finances. Or so we believed …
But at that moment, the Republican Party went over to the Dark Side. Under the influence of Dick “Deficits Don’t Matter” Cheney … and Reagan’s first secretary of the Treasury, Don Regan… the Gipper started to run up some of the biggest deficits in US history.
To continue reading; The Debtberg
