Living on Credit
Social Security payments are all borrowed money. The feds cleaned out the Social Security account during the Viet Nam war, replacing cash with IOUs.
As with all other government IOUs, the feds fund Social Security by borrowing, and they will never pay off those IOUs. If they hadn’t raided the trust to pay for a war, they’d be borrowing less, if anything, to fund Social Security. The government may say they fund Social Security with tax revenue, but money is fungible. Tomorrow they will claim that something else is paid for by tax revenue, but if the whole budget isn’t paid for via tax revenue then all of it is supported by borrowing. That needs to stop, but the only way we see to stop living on credit is to spend less, and that means making government smaller and more efficient.
All governments get bigger. The question is whether government girth increase is intentional or just an unfortunate fact. Do they evolve or do they just get bigger? Is getting fat evolving from being skinny?
Government managers want their department to get bigger – it’s a power thing. Government employees want more employees – they’ll have less work to do. People who play the system instead of taking care of themselves want bigger government so they can get more goodies.
So who doesn’t want a larger government? The average person wants the Goldilocks government: not too small to do its job, not so large that it will be wasteful, but just right.
We subscribe to the government being just large enough to fit into the Constitution. That’s not the government 
we have today.
The Constitution is rather clear in telling us how big the government should be by listing the enumerated powers – those things the government is allowed to do – and then casting this limitation in stone in the 10th Amendment. For those of you who haven’t memorized the Constitution, the 10th Amendment reads:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Federal government powers are listed in the Constitution, exactly as the 10th Amendment states. We don’t want a government breaking the law by doing things it’s not allowed to do, do we?
If you believe that there’s a chance the government has overreached their allowed powers, you’re correct.
Without a fundamental change in how we see government, we will never fix government. We’re headed for a 
socialist nanny state, and until we change the direction we’re going, government will continue to evolve, it will continue grow, and it will continue to act in a manner not in the best interests of the people. When the government responds to the wants of a minority rather than complying with the limitations set in the Constitution, the result is no longer a constitutional republic.
There are many departments and agencies in the federal government that have no legal basis for existence. We advocate for their removal; send them to the states if the function is needed, dissolve them if it’s just window dressing. We will publish a list of unauthorized federal government agencies in our next post.
Till then, keep the faith!
the people in Western North Carolina still need help, it’s cold and wet in the mountains, and it’s too soon for the new administration to make a difference there. We continue to ask that you do whatever you can to assist them. 
We continue to recommend Samaritan’s Purse or Mercury One as already on the ground and doing excellent work. Thank you.
If you like what you see, you can read more at Jack’s Substack
Continuity planning, civilian and military
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