The national debt is not a debt. It is a rented commodity.

For the time it faced the crushing debts accumulated during the revolution, the United States has always been in debt. The only exception to this rule is so surprising it is excitedly discussed by people who run across it.

The biggest way for the United States Government to take money from the South and give it to New England was by tariffs. Tariffs allowed New England to sell industrial goods to Southerners at a much higher price than they could have bought them abroad.

It was also true that tariffs brought money in to the United States Treasury. During the Jackson Administration the Tariff of Abominations was passed. It was total robbery from the South by New England to such an extent that Southern “Leaders” actually objected to it.

What is not mentioned is that a BY-PRODUCT of this robbery was a flow of money into the Treasury. For a couple of years, unique in our history, there was no national debt.

This is not 1834. We no longer misbelieve that animals have no territory or property or class system, although every single ideology today takes that assumption as its basic

The national debt is no longer a promise of “real money.”

We all know what a bankrupt man means when he says, “My signature is worthless.” It means we expect a person in ordinary circumstances to have a signature, a mere scratch of the pen, which is worth money. You pay for something with goods, money or a signature.

The national debt is similar to the tariff example. From 1789 on the Great Southern Leaders allowed the federal government to be financed almost entirely out of their own DIRECT taxes, tariffs actually paid, and at the same time they let New England rob them by charging higher prices for its untaxed goods.

By the time the South became a conquered province in 1865, New Englanders quite reasonably thought that was the natural way of things.

Since 1939 the United States has made it clear that it has the right to defend Europe while Europe has little military, to give foreign aid, to impose democracy on anybody it feels like, and to have some lawyers in robes tell every branch of government what it can do.

It is a little late for the country to realize that the government has taken the powers the Greatest Generation was too weak to deny them.

And no one would ask the Greatest Generation to pay for its own war, its own decision, much less for its own benefits.

So the national debt is not a debt, and it is not a separate issue.

By the way, until very recently most of our debt was the result of World War II. Each good year until the late 80s the deficit was about ten percent of the budget, and the interest on the national debt was abut ten percent of the budgets.

Interest rates on the national debt were higher than ten percent in the Carter Administration’s inflation, but on the average a dollar debt in 1940 is ten to twenty dollars now. Selling that debt anew each year or two also drives other interest rates up.

No one has mentioned this, because no one has noticed it.

The problem is not “the debt.” The problem is that the vote is either bought, that is, the owners, the chiefs, of the non-white tribes are bought off, and the white voters are cowards.

Even respectable conservatives are allowed to shout Zowee at the sheer numbers of the so-called national debt. But the problem is special only in that respectables are allowed to talk about it.