This article was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic
Collapse Blog.
The borrower is the servant of the lender, and through the mechanism of
government debt virtually the entire planet has become the servants of the
global money changers. Politicians love to borrow money, but over time
government debt slowly but surely impoverishes a nation. As the elite get
governments around the globe in increasing amounts of debt, those governments
must raise taxes in order to keep servicing those debts. In the end, it is all
about taking money from us and transferring it into government pockets, and
then taking money from government pockets and transferring it into the hands
of the elite. It is a game that has been going on for generations, and it is
time for humanity to say that enough is enough.
According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has now
reached a new all-time record high of 217 trillion dollars…
Global debt levels have surged to a record $217 trillion in the first
quarter of the year. This is 327 percent of the world’s annual economic
output (GDP), reports the Institute of International Finance (IIF).
The surging debt was driven by emerging economies, which have increased
borrowing by $3 trillion to $56 trillion. This amounts to 218 percent of
their combined economic output, five percentage points greater year on year.
Never before in human history has our world been so saturated with debt.
And what all of this debt does is that it funnels wealth to the very top
of the global wealth pyramid. In other words, it makes global wealth
inequality far worse because this system is designed to make the rich even
richer and the poor even poorer.
Every year the gap between the wealthy and the poor grows, and it has
gotten to the point that eight men have as much wealth as the
poorest 3.6 billion people on this planet combined…
Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people
who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published
by Oxfam today to mark the annual meeting of political and business leaders
in Davos.
This didn’t happen by accident. Sadly, most people don’t even understand
that this is literally what our system was designed to do.
Today, more than 99 percent of the population of the planet lives in a
country that has a central bank. And debt-based central banking is designed
to get national governments trapped in endless debt spirals from which they
can never possibly escape.
For example, just consider the Federal Reserve. During
the four decades before the Federal Reserve was created, our country enjoyed
the best period of economic growth in U.S. history. But since the
Fed was established in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by
approximately 98 percent and the size of our national debt has gotten more
than 5000 times larger.
It isn’t an accident that we are 20 trillion dollars in
debt. The truth is that the debt-based Federal Reserve is doing exactly
what it was originally designed to do. And no matter what politicians
will tell you, we will never have a permanent solution to our debt problem until we get
rid of the Federal Reserve.
In 2017, interest on the national debt will be nearly half a trillion
dollars.
That means that close to 500 billion of our tax dollars will go out the
door before our government spends a single penny on the military, on roads,
on health care or on anything else.
And we continue to pile up debt at a rate of more than 100 million dollars
an hour. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government
will add more than a trillion
dollars to the national debt once again in 2018…
Unless current laws are changed, federal individual income tax collections
will increase by 9.5 percent in fiscal 2018, which begins on Oct. 1,
according to data released today by the Congressional Budget Office.
At the same time, however, the federal debt will increase by more than $1
trillion.
We shouldn’t be doing this, but we just can’t seem to stop.
Let me try to put this into perspective. If you could somehow borrow a
million dollars today and obligate your children to pay it off for you, would
you do it?
Maybe if you really hate your children you would, but most loving parents
would never do such a thing.
But that is precisely what we are doing on a national level.
Thomas Jefferson was strongly against government debt because he believed
that it was a way for one generation to steal from another generation. And he
actually wished that he could have added another amendment to the U.S.
Constitution which would have banned government borrowing…
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution.
I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the
administration of our government to the genuine principles of its
Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal
government the power of borrowing.”
And the really big secret that none of us are supposed to know is that
governments don’t actually have to borrow money.
But if we start saying that too loudly the people that are making
trillions of dollars from the current system are going to get very, very upset
with us.
Today, we are living in the terminal phase of the biggest debt bubble in
the history of the planet. Every debt bubble eventually ends
tragically, and this one will too.
Bill Gross recently noted that “our highly
levered financial system is like a truckload of nitro glycerin on a bumpy
road”. One wrong move and the whole thing could blow sky high.
When everything comes crashing down and a great crisis happens, we are
going to have a choice.
We could try to rebuild the fundamentally flawed old system, or we could scrap it and start over with something
much better.
My hope is that we will finally learn our lesson and discard the
debt-based central banking model for good.
The reason why I am writing about this so much ahead of time is so that
people will actually understand why the coming crisis is happening as it
unfolds.
If we can get everyone to understand how we are being systematically
robbed and cheated, perhaps people will finally get mad enough to do
something about it.
