Here we sit on the brink of a Federal Government shutdown and once again the battle lines are drawn but unfortunately few understand the true enemy.  My hope with this two part post is to identify the true enemy of Freedom and American Exceptionalism and formulate a strategy how we can defeat them.

Who the Left says the enemy is

If you get your news from NPR, then you are sure that the enemy is the obstructionist Tea Party members of the House.  Their headline says it all:

Of course NPR forgets to tell you that the House already passed a bill last week to keep the Federal Government running but Senate Democrats (and many Republicans) chose shutting down the government over defunding Obamacare.  And never mind that the House passed a compromise bill yesterday to keep the government open but delayed Obamacare implementation and removed the business killing Medical Device Tax.  Harry Reid won’t allow that but again, it’s the evil Republicans who are shutting the government down.

Who I say the enemy is

In case you missed it, the US is in a serious fiscal emergency and if it takes a government shutdown to address the real problems of the US then so be it (a little pain now will be worth it if we can save this country).  I’ve been very honest over the past year that my strategy of “Let It Burn” is really the only way to get people to wake up but I hope I’m wrong and we can still correct these problems before the whole country collapses.

Just read this Heritage post to get a feel for our hopeless Fiscal situation.  Here are some of the lowlights:

Washington will spend nearly $3.5 trillion in 2013 while collecting $2.8 trillion in revenues, resulting in a deficit of $642 billion.

Over the past 20 years, federal spending grew 63 percent faster than inflation.

Mandatory spending, including Social Security and means-tested entitlements, doubled after adjusting for inflation. Discretionary spending grew by 49 percent.

Despite publicly held debt surging to three-fourths the size of the economy (as measured by GDP), net interest costs have fallen as interest rates have dropped to historic lows.

In 1963, defense spending was 9 percent of GDP and mandatory spending on entitlement programs was 6.1 percent of GDP, one-third lower.

In 2013, spending on defense is at about 4 percent of GDP and falling, while mandatory spending (including net interest) is reaching 14.5 percent of GDP and growing.

31 cents of every dollar Washington spent in 2012 was borrowed, resulting in a $1.1 trillion deficit.

45 percent, or almost half of all spending ,went toward paying for Social Security and health care entitlements (primarily Medicare and Medicaid). In 2002, that was only 25 percent. Without reform of these massive and growing programs, Washington will have to borrow increasing amounts of money, piling debt onto younger generations and putting the nation on a dangerous economic course.

Social Security is the largest federal spending program and has held this position since surpassing defense in 1993.

Medicare is one of the largest and fastest-growing programs in the entire federal budget.

Obamacare will add $1.8 trillion to federal health care spending by 2023. By 2015, health care spending will overtake Social Security as the largest budget item, including Obamacare’s coverage expansion provisions: a massive expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for the new health insurance exchanges.

It is clear to me that right now, the true enemy to the US is not Al Qaeda or another country; the enemy is Liberalism.   Left leaning Democrats and complacent Republicans got us in this mess by shackling us with skyrocketing debt, crony capitalism, over regulation, unsustainable entitlement programs and shifting the US culture away from American Exceptionalism.

Later this week I’ll provide another post on how we can defeat liberalism and this idea came to me from a book by William F. Buckley called Flying High.  If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest it!

UPDATE – Part 2 of this blog post can be found here.