Discretionary Spending
Hintervolks Revelation
Remember the Stimulus!
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
What a week
this has been.
The volume
of exchanges from my source of news, the Hintervolks, has diminished. Most of
that crew of Americans is now incredulous watching the marches, the rioting,
and the meltdown of the angry American Left. It is actually pretty amazing what
commercial spontaneity can do when the buses are lined up, the infrastructure
is mobilized, and the professional protesters take to the streets. Even the
chanting reminds you of the antics of the professional yell leaders of green
mobs crowing for more of something free and supposedly natural.
“What do we
want?”
“More
Things!”
“When do we
want it?”
“Right
NOW!”
“How bad do
we want it?”
“Real Bad!”
Diary reminders
I spent too
much of the last two days trying to stay warm (and cool), wiping my nose,
coughing, and attempting to find a single entry of interest in my great
grandmother’s diary. On that account I have been unsuccessful, but what a
journey back in time it has been. It has reminded me that she was one of the
most remarkable people of her time.
She was
born in Texas and came west in 1884 walking alongside a wagon loaded with bare
necessities, trailing ahead of a herd of cattle in order to have camp ready and
meals prepared upon arrival of the cowboys and the herd at a nightly bedding
ground, and arriving on the banks of Mogollon Creek with nothing other than
God’s creation on all points of the compass. She was seven years old.
Ten years
later in 1894 she was accepted into the first class of the New Mexico Normal School
which would become New Mexico
Teachers College which
would eventually become Western
New Mexico University.
In 1897, she earned a teaching credential, and, perhaps, the first college
degree in the history of her family. She never taught, but her surviving
grandchildren universally remember her as teaching every day of her life. Her
gifts were largely written words.
An entry in
December 1954 noted she had written and sent 172 Christmas cards.
My uncle,
Bill, who has been so instrumental in revealing so much of the nuances of her
life aside from the diaries and my own brief memories of her, remembers
spending much time with her after Grandpa Rice died in the ‘40s and awakening
around the 3:00 AM witching
hour and she would be sitting in her chair writing. Daybreak would put her in
her garden or orchards weeding or irrigating and singing hymns to herself or
whomever might be there alongside her.
I have a copy
of a letter she wrote “to her grandchildren and to those yet unborn” of various
events including the horrors of the Apache raids in 1885, her memory of the
buffalo soldiers, the growth of the community at Cliff, and things most
important to her. Through it all I am struck with the moderation of tone in all
observations, the absence of malice regardless of circumstances, and the
importance she built around family. Her home was a whirlwind of activity. In a
one week period in 1951, I counted 13 different cooks who were party to meals
prepared in her kitchen on the big wood burning stove that I can remember.
Given names were the normal references with few exceptions. You had to know who
she was talking about or you are lost in context. “The twins” were one of those
exceptions and everybody who knows the family knows immediately who she
referenced (was it because she couldn’t tell Jean and Janet apart?).
She was the
family matriarch, but that became more important following Lee’s death. She
kept tallies of cattle from sons and daughter coming and going. Cull cows and
bulls going to market, and grain coming and or being dispensed from the
granary. Her 1951 property and personal property taxes totaled $419.97, but
that was only part of the business that day of diary entries. “Robert, Fayette,
Blue, Joe and Donald worked cattle at the Rastus Place. All of them got wet.
Donald, Robert, and Edwin worked Robert’s cows, Donald took Blue’s horse home,
Billy fed the cows in field, Minnie brought one gallon and three quarts of
milk”.
She got to
see “Rolland and Billy’s FFA jackets” and “they are so nice”.
“In the
evening it was still raining and Francis, Stella Mae, Doris,
Pat, Fran, Ethel, Betty, Beth, David (joined the group for supper). We had
fried chicken and Betty fixed the most beautiful flowers for the table. We all
ate ice cream.”
She never
drove and “traded Lee’s 1941 Dodge and $150 to boot for a 2½ ton bobtail truck
for the ranch”. She worked on the (International Farmall) ‘M’ too many times
and finally sent it to somebody in Hatch to overhaul.
Work was
her passion, her pleasure, and her lifelong companion. “Work is a blessing” she
wrote January 14, 1954.
In two other places I found Kiplings’s Work
is a Blessing in its entirety written in her diary. What she didn’t do was
worship the monetary results of that work. She was never materialistic. What I
have looked for in vain up to this hour was the entry I once found where she
divulges she never owned a pair of silk stockings, had not been to a ball game
in the gym (up to that time) that was built on lands her husband and she
donated to the community scores of years earlier for the school, and never saw
much of the world outside of the view of the horizons on her walk from Texas
and the Gila Valley of New Mexico where she spent the remainder of her life.
Her
discretionary spending was nearly zero.
What she left was a ranch for each
of her four offspring, nearly universal respect from the community, and bills
always paid in full and on time. She hated debt which probably limited the
expanse of hills and canyon bottoms alike that once had PIT branded cattle.
All of America could
do well by learning to emulate the life of Mary Belle Shelley Rice who we knew
simply as … Ma.
Hintervolks revelation
This
looming budget debate is going to be a donnybrook.
As you
should know, there has been no federal budget since 2007. Federal law requires
an annual budget, but nary a single one has been done for eight years and the
fellow in the White House and both political parties should be marched to the
woodshed as a consequence.
The law has
been compromised.
This matter
hasn’t been a point of discussion within the press. Rather, it is a matter
coming to light and the attention of the emerging grass roots news services,
the voices of the common people, the
Hintervolk, through social media.
Let’s start
by reviewing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The thrust of the act
was to inject fiscal stimulus into the economy in order to avoid a meltdown.
The stimulus was just short of one trillion dollars or $986B. That bump
constituted a growth of about 20% in federal spending, and, of course, that
spending went directly to the deficit. We were told that approximately 30% of
the total was to be spent in 2009 and the remaining 70% in 2010.
The truth,
though, now appears that the mother of all stimuli didn’t get spent in 2010. It
has continued to be spent, and, in fact, has been replicated in each of the
ensuing years when no federal budget was created or approved. In other words,
the stimulus was not the purported $986B. Rather, it is the accumulation of a
whopping $7.265T stimulus spanning eight years.
The
avoidance of creating a budget, the complicity of all elected leadership, and
the emergence of these dreadful continuing resolutions (CR) has allowed the
duplication of previous year’s discretionary spending of nearly a trillion
dollars to be placed in the hands of the president. This was done on the basis
of baseline budgeting which, in the absence of a federal budget, simply rolls
previous year expenditures forward with authorized multipliers.
The scheme
worked.
In 2015 under Paul Ryan’s
leadership, even the debt limit was removed so they would not have to go back
through the process for approval of spending authority. There was reason why no
budgeting was done and these CRs were approved. Money was being authorized by
outright gimmick without open debate.
In order to try to verify this
hypothesis being circulated through social media, I looked at the federal
spending since 2007. I believe the numbers
verify the assertion. At 2007 spending levels, the federal government was
spending just over $2.7T annually. Without an approved budget since, the
average annual expenditure over that baseline has averaged $897B.
There have been eight stimulus
packages!
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “There is more reason every day to install term
limits on ALL of Washington.”
No comments:
Post a Comment