by Chuck DeVore
BigGovernment.com
12/21/2009
If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends. Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21st Century slavery, if you will.
First, some background.
On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories. The Republican Party was barely three months old. Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the “fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
Lincoln was moved to action by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, widely seen as a check on the growth of slavery in the territories.
At Peoria, Lincoln presented the economic, legal and moral case against slavery.
Today, we are faced with a similar and urgent crisis: a burgeoning debt at all levels of government that threatens our prosperity, our posterity, and our probity.
This week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 218-214 to raise the debt limit to $12.4 trillion. Including all unfunded liabilities, such as Medicare and Social Security, federal obligations have reached $106 trillion.
Just the cost of paying back the borrowing from President Obama’s Stimulus plan, which I opposed, will cost you $280 per month for the rest of your life. Imagine buying and trashing an iPod every month for the rest of time – that’s the practical impact of just one of the many planned expansions of government from Obama, Reid, Pelosi and Boxer…
…Paying for all of this federal spending will eventually force middle-class tax rates to double. For those in college that means you will likely have to postpone starting a family and buying a house, take longer to pay off your student loans, and have less savings for education, health care, and retirement.
This is intergenerational theft and it is immoral.
In fact, it has a certain parallel to slavery. In effect, your leaders are stealing from your future while you, those younger than you, and those yet born, don’t have a say in the process. It is, as Lincoln said, based on pure “self-interest.” Of the mounting debt and its impact on the 65 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 30 we can invoke Lincoln by saying that your, “sacred right of self government is grossly violated by it!”…
…Our national debt also has profound and unsettling national security ramifications. Since Mr. Obama became president, the Peoples Republic of China has quietly sold their long-term U.S. government securities and shifted their entire $985 billion government debt portfolio to securities with six-month maturities. What might happen next spring when the Chinese simply let these securities mature and demand dollars for their debt?…
The article continues at BigGovernment.com
Chuck DeVore is a California State Assemblyman and candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010. He retired from the Army National Guard at the rank of lieutenant colonel and served as a Reagan White House appointee in the Pentagon. He co-authored the novel ‘China Attacks’.
He can be followed on Twitter @chuckdevore and his Facebook account is facebook.com/DeVoreForCalifornia.
Assemblyman DeVore’s candidacy against Sen. Barbara Boxer has been endorsed by SC Senator Jim DeMint.
