We will fight with all we have against every single enemy of our country or Constitution, be they foreign or domestic.Qu’ils Mangent de la Brioche
I believe that particular phrase should be chiseled into every lintel on every door in the Capitol and the White House, because they certainly are living it there. They own it. They work it like a broken down mule when the horse has been sold for seeds and coal.
In case you aren’t familiar with it, the famous English equivalent is, “Let them eat cake,” which is badly translated…it should be ‘Let them eat brioche,’ but then you’d have a translation like, ‘Let them eat rich, expensive, funny-shaped, yellow, eggy buns’ which lacks the brevity and punch.
It is dubiously attributed to Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution, which we all know didn’t really work out for their Fearless Leaders.
Now we have the news that the President has spent over ten million dollars just on parties at the White House, which have occurred at an average rate of one party every three days, which works out to nearly sixty thousand dollars per party. This does not include the 28 holiday parties and open houses that occurred over the holidays.
Speaker “No-Grip” Pelosi, not only has spent over one hundred thousand dollars in taxpayer funds on booze for the Air Force jet she demands for her on-call use, but the jet itself costs you and I between six and twenty-two thousand dollars per hour to operate (depending on the size of the jet she wants) and by all accounts, she uses it like her own personal car, including purely personal trips to fly her children and grandchildren back and forth from San Francisco to DC without any Congressional staff being on board.
All this while the economy is holding on by the skin of its teeth and millions of Americans are face to face with joblessness, losing their homes and facing higher taxes to pay down the government’s massive spending.
I find it odd that today’s leaders seem to take little or no notice of history’s lessons.
Some of the causes of the French Revolution came from a repeating cycle of incurring large amounts of debt by the monarchy, then raising taxes on the poor and middle classes to pay it down. Since France had a deficit of foreign trade at the time, nearly all the monarchy’s revenue had to be derived internally. By the time the King attempted to reform the system, it was far too late.
Another example: Nearly all of my acquaintances in Japan have stated that America appears to be on the very course that Japan took during their ‘Lost Decade’ and they marvel that we would make the same mistakes so recently after that disaster. Ten years of astronomical government spending, national debt in excess of 200% of their entire economy, massive bailouts of multiple industries, hundreds of billions wasted on needless infrastructure projects and zero percent lending which all led to a massive bubble which when it finally let go for real, crippled them for more than a decade.
So here we are on the Eve of Destruction with the President proposing a massive $3.8 trillion dollar income redistribution scheme budget. No significant tax breaks for small business or individuals. No budget cuts worth mentioning…well, there is that whopping $20 billion that the President is touting that they wiggled by killing the Earned Income Tax Credit, which only leaves $1.28 trillion of debt over expected receipts.
Which makes sense. If you happen to be congenitally insane, criminally negligent, you failed elementary school math classes or simply have less common sense than a small grapefruit.
In the end, history actually does repeat itself, a lesson that isn’t lost to those who pay attention to what has and what is currently going on in the world. The flip side is that the people who are not acquainted with the past are doomed to repeat it, and in this case, take the rest of down with them.
