Republican victory? Debt talks

Recently our house Republicans declared a "victory" after they were able to get $38 Billion dollars in spending cuts from our 3.6 Trillion federal budget. That same budget is $1.4 Trillion in the red.

So where is the victory?

Did you know that the interest that our county, yours and mine, has to pay on that 1.4 Trillion dollar debt is $213 Billion dollars?

So where is the savings?

You see, the signers of our constitution, the founding fathers, purposely gave the federal government limited powers. This left the people free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness on their own merit and either flourish on their own, or fail on their own. Somewhere along the line our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike have perverted that vision and insisted that some companies were "too big to fail". The danger in this thought process is that it is the government's responsibility to bail out companies with poor management skills, all on the backs of taxpayers.

I heard the arguments, "If this bank goes under it will devastate the economy so we need to bail them out." That line of thinking is total horse crap.

You see with free enterprise you always have your "big dogs", your "medium sized dogs" and your "small dogs". Let me give you a scenario. With the current bail out strategy you can have a bank, let's call them XYZ corp. Initiate careless lending policies, throwing out their clients money around to people who should not qualify for those same loans, when the loans default, the banks get the property. What happened is too many banks were recieving property for defaulted loans that there was no money coming into those banks to repay the clients money used to give out the loans. This is where the bailout comes in. The federal government gives the money to the same banks who mismanaged the funds, all on the backs of the taxpayer. In the meantime the banks still have all that property to control and sell back, what do they use the money for? Buying up other, smaller banks. Yes by mismanaging loans and going into default status XYZ Corp now comes out stronger with less competition from other mid and small banks. It's left less "mom and pop" banks, or neighborhood banks out there, the competition is dwindling so why change the policies for XYZ Corp? They are slowly growing into a Monopoly and have become a mega-bank.

Capitalism has come under fire as of late. But the policies our government are following are anything but Capitalism. What should have happened to XYZ Corp is they should have defaulted on those loans, the properties should have been auctioned off and pennies on the dollar and the clients of that bank should have been paid off, and XYZ should have been left vulnerable to a take over by one of those medium or small sized banks whose lending policies left them in a stronger position to grow. XYZ Corp gets bought out and gets absorbed into the purchasing bank and goes away. A smaller sized bank then takes XYZ's place and the policies of that bank stay the same and the fiscal outlook of that bank stay strong. Eventually another smaller bank starts up and the cycle continues. That is capitalism, the strongest survives, it creates competition. Companies with poor business sense go away, companies with strong business sense grow. In the short term this would damage the economy but leave it with a much better chance to recover in a much stronger light. Under current policies, mis-managed companies are still in power, but the economy has taken a serious hit that will be felt for decades to come. It's no wonder the dollar has crashed and the countries credit rating is plummeting.

Our government needs to live just like you and I, within their means. If you can afford to buy a television because you need to pay the heating bill, you do not buy the television. One cause of the crash is too many people started to live their lives like our federal government -  on credit. Look what happened in the past few years to our economy because of this choice. Now multiply that when our creditors come looking for all that borrowed spending from our government. The policies need to change now.