America's Big Bluff - Updated
After financing the American Revolution because of the personal and 'state' appeals of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, France faced many extreme climatic disasters -- including extremely cold winters, vaporously toxic and cloudy skies, and extremely hot summers (with voluminous thunderstorms of heavy rain and giant hail) -- in consecutive years, all following the weak harvests of the 1770s and the Flour Wars.
All of this left the French monarchy in need of tax collections of the financial reserves of the nobles and the Church, but not from its troubled, starving, and impoverished peasantry. When the Estates General [France’s ‘occasional legislature’] met, the nobles and the Church wanted to maintain supermajority control by allowing each of the three estates -- the nobles, the Church, and the peasants -- only one vote per estate rather than proportionally, of which the peasants were the greatest group in number.
Today, America faces the same trials. President George W. Bush started two wars that he never fully or appropriately funded (Iraq was almost entirely financed like a fiction of no occurrence); thus, he piled them (the wars) onto the US deficit/debt.
Bush left the US government with no cash reserves to deal with crises -- like the 2008 housing crisis. TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailed America out of this crisis and amounted to more ‘borrowed’ money, also called deficit financing. Republicans high-fived each other as they blamed President Obama for all of this borrowing, but it was their creation and their solution they left to Obama on day 1.
President Donald Trump did not have the needed financial reserves for dealing with COVID, so it became a deficit issue.
The rich have filled their stock portfolios with the unfunded tax cuts of Bush and Trump -- both of which increased US deficit spending.
As church memberships and attendance languish in America, Christian schools are seeking to receive unaccountable public financing for their schools and Republicans are just recently becoming happy to oblige. This misdirected and misguided public finance of religion in America all goes back to President Bush’s Faith-based and Community Initiative, a quack attempt at implementing President George H. W. Bush’s “a thousand points of light.”
King Louis XVI and President George W. Bush both started these apocalyptic travesties as opportunistic gambles to vanquish their foes -- England and Saddam Hussein.
Louis, Bush, and Trump both were unable to respond to domestic crises because of fiscal mismanagement. They all had the money in their countries, but they would not trouble their elite classes to help save their countries in times of crisis.
Grover Norquist has been a cancerous lesion on America since he gutted the conservative right of its fiscal moral compass by implementing Ronald Reagan's mantra "starve the beast" in the most inflexible and inoperative way. Well, the people of France and the US government [a citizen government] are not beasts. They are dignified citizens who desire an honest government that will help them survive and thrive without playing idiotic ideological games with their sanity.
Saturday (5/20/23), House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was crying about tax revenue (taxes) being put in the negotiations for the current 'horse trading' on the debt ceiling, all while on his chopping block is mostly programs for everyday Americans.