Credit card companies give college students free credit cards because they know the students will enter into life-long loans. The youth become perpetual slaves of the credit card companies, whose interest rate charges are so high that the student falls further behind with every payment.

There is a song by Merle Travis entitled “Sixteen Tons,” and it speaks of miners who were paid such low wages that their owed more to the company each day than they could ever earn:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

You probably know some students who come out of college with $25,000 or more in credit card debt, with no job, and no way to pay off their cards, and interest rates that are astronomical. Even if they can find a job, the salary for many will not allow them to pay off their debt and buy a car or a house for years to come. Some have paid for their tuition, room, and board with credit cards! Others have been trained by commercial television to buy whatever you want NOW, and put it on credit. So they have iPads and iPhones and cell plans, but no way to pay for it. Most students get no training in high school on how to manage debt nor warnings as to the consequences of credit card interest rates that can go as high as 35%.

Well, Congress, in its spending habits, acts like a college student with a credit card and no spending limit. Just because you want something and it seems like a good thing, doesn’t mean you can afford it. But Congress, in a fantasy world of its own making, thinks it can just borrow money and keep on spending with no thought of every having to pay off the debt. That is why the adults have to put a spending limit on Congress, or it will never learn. Yes, giving everyone free health care, unemployment benefits, and free housing sounds like a great thing to do for everyone, but the problem is that there isn’t enough money in the entire country to provide everything for everyone. We are now $16 trillion dollars in debt and on the verge of insolvency. We have run out of money. Besides, it isn’t government’s job to take care of everyone and provide for every need.

I like what Allen West says: The Constitution says the government is called to “promote the General Welfare;” it  does not say the government is to “provide for the General Welfare,” which seems to be the idea of the Democrats. The only way government can take on these massive spending programs is by borrowing money and by confiscating money from the productive members of society.

Our tenet ever was . . . that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action. – Thomas Jefferson

Government has the ability to make everyone equally poor, but not the ability to make everyone rich…

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. – Thomas Jefferson

In the end, the United States will find that those who loan us money (China, esp.) will one day decide that the US cannot pay back its outstanding obligations, and they will stop lending. They will cut us off from further borrowing, just like the kid who maxes out his credit card. And we will then find that our interest rates and interest payments will outstrip our income, no matter how much we tax the “wealthy.”  In truth, if the taxes are too high and the wealthy are truly wealthy, they will just leave the country. I would.

Many of you are not old enough to remember the 18% interest rates in the 1980’s, but if China and other countries stop lending us money, our interest rates will go higher than that in an instant. We will go broke and declare bankruptcy, or inflate our way out of the debt. And you think Social Security will be preserved by this profligate spending and endless promises made by the Democrats? Maybe, but the money you receive will be pennies on the dollar, or Social Security will be dissolved. Think the government owes you Social Security? Think again. If need be, Congress can dissolve it. If the country is bankrupt, good luck trying to live off what the government can provide.

That is why taking steps now to reduce government spending and reform entitlements is the surest way to preserve Social Security for future generations and solvency for our country.

I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread. I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. – Thomas Jefferson