"A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT"
Benjamin Franklin was one of the founding fathers of the United States. He attended the Constitutional Convention and signed the document that set out strict parameters for the nascent, national government. After exiting the convention, a woman (possibly Elizabeth Willing Powell) approached him and excitedly asked what kind of government they had established. He famously responded, "A republic, if you can keep it." A republic is the form of government in which supreme political power is vested in the people, to be exercised on their behalf, by elected representatives. His remark was a warning that the new republic's future was uncertain and wholly dependent upon an informed citizenry willing to closely follow its actions and keep it within its proscribed boundaries.
Franklin knew that without constant citizen oversight all republics throughout history had become authoritarian regimes. The US Constitution defines the limited powers of the national government and declares that all powers not specifically delegated to the newly formed government were retained by the independent state governments. The retention of those rights and powers in the states was to ensure that the national government could not dominate the state governments and their citizens. That constitution scheme has long since been turned on its head. The national government has become all powerful and routinely injects itself into matters clearly outside of its constitutional remit. The republic has long since been lost - just as Franklin warned.
It was lost because distant governments, acting largely out of sight of the people, always seek to coalesce ever more power into their hands and extract ever more wealth from the people. While voters can easily learn what their town's mayor is up to, they are less likely to know what their state representative is up to and are most unlikely to have any idea what their Congressional representative is up to. The main stream media purport to keep voters informed of national government affairs, but they have become mere propagandists for their preferred political party. The New York Times and Washington Post employed reporters who attended White House briefings for four years, followed President Biden on trips and well knew of his obvious infirmities. Instead of acting as honest journalists and disclosing those infirmities to the people, they shamefully parroted White House and Democratic leadership lies that he was "sharp as a tack." Sean Ring writes,
The media didn’t just get this wrong—they intentionally suppressed it. Let’s show the receipts: The Washington Post ran 19(!) editorials in 2024 defending Biden’s “vigor” and mocking “right-wing attacks” on his health. CNN’s medical panel (remember Dr. Gupta?) claimed in July 2024 that “Biden shows no signs of cognitive impairment.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid called concerns about Biden’s mental state “a coded form of racism.” (Seriously.) Now, the same journalists are clutching pearls and pretending this is a surprise. Jake Tapper: “I didn’t know.”
The main stream media, both left-leaning and right-leaning, have repeatedly proven themselves to be political partisans whose reporting is not to be trusted. They have failed to meet basis journalistic standards to fairly investigate events and honestly report on them. Rather, their jobs have been to tar and feather their political rivals.
The result is that Americans are ill-informed. And they have not been diligent in their duty to ride herd on their national government. Most of what happens in Washington D.C. happens behind closed doors between power brokers, lobbyists and government representatives each seeking favors from the other. That which takes place in public is largely ceremonial. The people have allowed their national government to insinuate itself into virtually every aspect of their lives and consume an ever larger portion of their earnings, savings, pensions, and estates, all in patent derogation of the government's Constitutional limitations. The "limited government" approved by the states has since grown into a leviathan that, during a time of peace, consumes nearly a quarter of the nation's entire GDP (2024 FY GDP $27.7 trillion, national government spending $6.8 trillion) and has rung up a national debt of $37 trillion. Taxpayers, their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will be saddled with this oppressive debt.
History has also proven that when governments attempt to dictate national economic policy it always leads to disaster (e.g.: the former USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina pre-Milei). That is because these policies are created by politicians seeking to favor their political supporters and line their own pockets. Few of these politicians have held an honest job in the real economy working as business owners who must constantly focus on the impact of government regulations, sourcing raw materials, monitoring employee costs, paying taxes and a myriad other considerations. Despite politicians' abject lack of relevant business management experience, the US Congress - and bureaucrats around the globe - endlessly meddle with and dictate to the productive portion of their economies. The cost of that meddling in lost productivity is staggering and negatively affects both business owners and their employees.
Consider the farcically named "Inflation Reduction Act" coming out of the Biden administration. It will direct somewhere between $730B-$1T of taxpayer dollars to favored industries and politically connected private organizations such as the National Green Bank, Climate United Fund and Power Forward Communities organization. Such mindless largess is not just a Democratic affliction. Trump's proposed One Big Beautiful [Spend-a-Thon] Bill proposal is estimated to add $2.5T to the primary deficit - but will cost some $3-4T, including interest on the deficits. It includes a smorgasbord of handouts to special interest groups and provides cuts in taxes without any meaningful cuts in spending. Biden shamelessly sought to buy the votes of college students by attempting to write off their student loans and heap that cost onto workers across the nation. In a comparable effort, Trump wants to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime income. There is no rational basis for giving servers a pass on a portion of their income but no such break for cooks. David Stockman minces no words,
Where OBBBA goes radically astray is that its dares to add several trillion dollars over the next decade to cumulative deficits that already total $26 trillion based on current spending and tax policy including extension of the 2017 [tax reduction act]. And when you delete all the accounting chicanery, the honestly priced-out math of OBBBA is downright b*tt ugly: It would result in a doubling of the current $36 trillion public debt in just 11 years years. That’s the end game—more red ink in the next 11 years than was generated during the first 236 years of the republic! No current generation of politicians can be entrusted with the right to implicitly burden—heavily and wantonly at that—future generations of taxpayers with debt service expense in order to fund today’s government spending.
A Financial Crisis of Epic Proportions
In just the first seven months of the 2025 fiscal year, the US government has already run a deficit of $1 trillion. Paying the interest on the national debt consumes more federal revenues than does defense. No one in government has been or is planning to do anything to address this problem. If you think that there are no adults in the room in Congress, you would be right. Musk is absolutely correct in describing the US funding bill under consideration as "a disgusting abomination."
It came to be an abomination for a reason. Politicians must raise enormous sums of money to get elected and then they owe "a debt of gratitude" to their large contributors. Should they fail to repay that debt, through favored legislation, subsidies and handouts, they will not get future contributions. Should they ever hint at reducing the budget to meet revenues, the people who would suffer the effects of the reductions will never support them again. Every dollar the government spends ends up in someone's pocket (actually millions of pockets) and they will all squeal if those dollars stop coming.
Politicians have just two priorities: 1) get elected, and 2) get reelected. They will endlessly pander to voters and contributors with promises of more grants, subsidies and benefits. It makes no difference which party is in power as the next chart shows (through Biden's third year in office). Americans can vote Democratic or Republican but the outcome is guaranteed to be the same - more debt, higher taxes, and fewer freedoms. While the two political parties portray themselves as vastly different, their differences are, at bottom, inconsequential.
It taxes far too little, and it spends far too much. It is hard to imagine a more reckless piece of make-believe. The two big cash-burners in advanced economies’ state spending are public sector salaries and welfare, and both desperately need to be addressed if Western democracies are ever to extract themselves from currently mountainous debt.
For the guardians of the global economy [central banks], gold - which has been used as a store of value since the first gold bars were created in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago - seemed destined for irrelevance. Yet bullion has made a roaring comeback, not just among speculators and so-called gold bugs who mistrust modern paper currencies, but even among the most conservative investors in the world .... In a febrile political era, when many of the core assumptions about the global economy are being questioned, gold has once more become an anchor. "Gold is the ultimate confusion trade," says Luca Pasolini, chief strategist at Pictet Asset Management, "the thing to have when every thing seems wobbly."
For more than a hundred years, the US dollar has been globally accepted as a reliable store of value and therefore saved by investors world-wide and held in government reserves in many countries. But the dollar has been constantly devalued by the US government, such that it is no longer a reliable store of value. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, the dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power. Who suffers? Workers, savers and retirees living on fixed incomes. Who benefits? Politicians who dole out trillions of newly minted dollars to their political cronies in return for campaign contributions. This chart reveals the vast extent of the debasement of the US dollar by those in political power.
What produces inflation is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else (emphasis added).
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