Stop the leak, then bail the boat
If your boat is taking on water, what do you do? That depends on your objective. Do you want it to sink and collect on the insurance and buy another boat? - Or do you want to save the boat. If you want it to sink, you let it take on more water until it disappears; maybe you even force more water in so it doesn’t appear possible to salvage it. Maybe you let it sink and begin anew. Our nation is sinking now and the actions taken by those at the helm indicate that they seem to want it to go down.
If you want to save a boat, you wouldn’t intentionally pour more water into it without bailing to some extent. A wise captain would try to determine where the leak is so to stop the descent into the water, then repair or slow the leak and bail.
There may be a few more of the variables we might want to know about the situation.
What kind of boat and how far from shore are we? Maybe we can just step out of the boat and walk it to shore. Maybe you swim a few yards. You are lucky, the boat is near the beach, but even a little leak in a small boat requires some effort to repair.
We have a big leak in a giant boat far out at sea.
We can't walk it or swim it back.
We could start to bail, but we haven't fixed the leak yet and it is very likely leaking faster than we can bail. If it is leaking more than we can bail, it will eventually sink. This is a certain law of nature. We need to find and fix the leak. It seems that instead we are trying our best to add more water to the sinking ship.
Welfare in all of its forms and big government is the leak. We need to stop or slow that leak first, then we can bail. Our strategy appears to have been just adding more and more water and hope at some point it will morph into a submarine. We tax more and hope to stay afloat. We now are at a point that we can't tax any more. We are sinking fast.
We face a bloated and corrupt system. Much like the tyrannical governments of third world countries, we are “maturing” into a less productive and more indolent society. We are ruled by lifetime legislators who serve themselves. Rather than a nation of free citizens full of unrelenting work ethic and pride, we look for alms and handouts from our neighbors.
The reason is simple - the government takes too much out of the economy for its own purposes and is sucking the life out of us. Our boat has taken on far too much water to stay afloat much longer. As a nation we spend too much, regulate too much, so we must by extension tax too much, so that we can borrow enough to spend even more.
We have to spend less. Then we can tax less. Stop the leak and bail the ship.
The following two chapters anticipate some “solutions” our fearless progressive leaders might suggest, Social Security Reform, and monetary policy. Unfortunately for us, we have to act to protect ourselves with expected government policy in mind. If we ignore them, we do so at our peril. We have to question just what their intentions are when they suggest these types of solutions. Do they want us to sink? Judging by past and current legislation, it seems this is the case. The following are the recommendations likely to come out of Washington in the next few years.