RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have been around guns my entire adult life. My father, my brother and my husband- gentle, kind and peaceful gentlemen- all owned guns. I spent many evenings before a fireplace in Connecticut cleaning, oiling and polishing handguns.

Each tragedy begets screeching about guns from both sides in the debate. A dear and scholarly friend- a physician, master carpenter and conservative sent me the following note which is a fair appraisal:

“Another awful day of carnage at the hands of an unstable young man wielding an automatic rifle. I’m all for protecting the Constitution, but when the writers penned the Second Amendment, fire arms were muzzle loaders that required three stages of ramming home powder, then wadding, and then the ball. No one envisioned even an all in one bullet comprising all three that could go directly into the breach of the weapon, much less automatic rapid-firing weapons with 30 round clips. AR-15s are military weapons used for killing humans in battle.

There is no reason for such weapons to be available for purchase by consumers other than the armed forces and law enforcement. With all due respect to the rights of hunters, why should such a weapon be used for hunting? Is the hunter fearful that the deer might shoot back if the first shot misses its mark and therefore needs to get off multiple rounds quickly to be certain the animal is dispatched? Background checks on buyers are certainly necessary but do not come into play on the secondary market where people with clean records purchasing guns make a profit when re-selling to folks who might not qualify as a gun buyer.

The issue can be dealt with while preserving the Second Amendment rights as envisioned by the founding fathers. I do not hunt, but my friends that do would give up the sport if their prowess was so bad as to require an automatic, big clip weapon.” M.M.M.D.

Last week Senator Rand Paul briefly shut the government down in protest of the $500 billion spending bill recently signed by the president. This latest binge will by 2027 increase to $800 billion the already $300 billion we currently spend on servicing the $20 trillion national debt. And that projected increase assumes interest rates at 3.5%. The debt-driving deficits are again approaching $1 trillion a year, meaning the debt will continue to expand beyond 100% of GDP, reaching $30 trillion in a decade.

But like Troy’s Cassandra, who for ten years accurately predicted the city’s destruction, Senator Paul was no more successful at alerting people to the coming calamity. Nor are any of the other fiscal hawks likely to do so either. The majority of citizens and politicians have no interest in our looming fiscal disaster, for they have become used to thinking that entitlements are “rights.”

The fiscal problem is one of simple mathematics. We spend much more than we take in from tax-paying citizens, which leads to more and more borrowing to make up the shortfall. And we have made promises to the people––Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid––that we have not funded adequately, and that now account for nearly two-thirds of the annual budget. Social Security alone has unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion, and that’s not as bad as Medicare’s $49 trillion. Worse yet, every day 10,000 Baby Boomers retire, meaning the beneficiaries will continue to expand. And right behind the Boomers are the 66 million Millennials. We’re looking at decades and decades of relentlessly increasing expenditures and the borrowing required to pay for them.

Most of the “solutions” to this problem are preposterous, functioning mainly as a political narcotic to numb the voters’ minds. The left thinks that raising taxes on the “rich” will generate enough money to fund these programs, even though confiscating all the wealth of America’s billionaires couldn’t fund the whole government for one year. The right thinks cutting taxes will create economic growth that will generate enough funds to put us in the black. But we can’t tax or grow our way out of this problem. Half the voters don’t pay federal taxes, nor do payroll deductions cover the whole bill for the average retiree, who will take more in benefits from Social Security and Medicaid than he paid for. Economic growth indeed increases revenues, but we typically spend the extra money instead of saving it so we can pay future bills or reduce the debt.