Next U.S. President Faces $500 Billion Budget Deficit

What an inauguration gift! By the time the next U.S. president takes office, he will be facing nearly a $500 billion budget shortfall. That's 1/2 trillion Dollars -- for a single year! What a staggering amount! (Lest anyone accuse me of overstating the official amount of $490 billion, I would remind them that this amount does not include the supplemental amount for the War in Iraq.) The American people have a very jolting wake-up call coming. Eventually, the credit card must reach its credit limit. Much of it may come in the form of inflation as their currency collapses and the Fed responds with ever greater amounts of fiat money, either via printing press or treasury notes (debt). They're all Keynesians now!

Here is the Bloomberg story today:

U.S. Deficit to Reach $490 Billion in 2009

Sometimes I wonder about the sanity of anyone who would want to be the President of the United States at this moment in time. It must be the power they want! No sane person would want the crushing responsibility or the comparatively paltry salary to goes with it! It seems to me that anyone that would seek the office must, by a priori evidence, be considered unbalanced, insane, and therefore unfit for the office. Wouldn't you just have to crazy to want the office?

The Founders established the electoral college, which has been corrupted by the two political parties, so that a person could be recruited for the office who might otherwise have never sought for it. They envisioned an electoral process in which some of the best people in the country would recruit the person who would best serve the people, rather than the one with the fattest coffers or the biggest mouth. This is how George Washington was selected as the first U.S. President. He was never a member of a political party. He despised them. He even warned about political parties in his farewell address to the nation. He had the foresight to know how desctructive they would prove to be. You would have thought he wrote the speech yesterday.

You can read it on the Yale Law School website here:

Washington's Farewell Address

This speech is not light reading. Like the other Founding Fathers, George Washington was a highly educated man, with an intellect unmatched by nearly any other mind in human history (except his contemporary Founders, who were universally some of the greatest minds and most noble of characters ever known amongst humankind).