The Solution To America's Mass Shooting Problem

“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” – Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet First Secretary 1953 to 1964 & premier of the Soviet Union 1958 to 1964, while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.  In this most famous of Khrushchev sayings he was not talking about literally burying the west with a shovel.  The first sentence shows Khrushchev’s understanding of the Death Of Democracy history in that a democracy, or constitutional Republic with strong democratic principles like America, is always temporary in nature because the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy which is always followed by a dictatorship.  In the second sentence I always thought he was referring to the erosion of the dollar’s purchasing power through inflation that required both the husband & wife to go into the workplace to meet the cost of living. This left children to be raised by others, or no one, to a large extent, which is the root cause of the continuous mass killing spree in America by mentally unstable distressed young men who had no family life or father figure @ all while growing up.

 

Khrushchev undoubtedly learned his lesson well from his communist predecessor Vladimir Lenin who was an advocate of putting an end to enemy countries by destroying that country’s families.  Lenin knew that a society could be overturned by debauching the currency so that “not one man in a million” would be aware of the subtle destruction brought by inflation – the government wealth confiscation program that secretly & unobserved steals the wealth of the citizenry.  It was the general increase in prices & the fall in the purchasing power of money that forced mothers out of their homes instead of raising their children like many of the members of this readership benefitted from. 

 

Whether it was Lenin or Khrushchev, the sentiment is certainly the same – just look @ America the past fifty to sixty years.  It takes both a husband & wife in a typical middle class family to go into the workplace to bring home two paychecks of debased currency so that ends can @ least see each other if not totally meet.  The purchasing power of the middle class has increased only infinitesimally over the last 40 plus years.  The median earnings for men working full time year round has been stagnate @ around $50,000 per year in constant 2017 dollars from 1972 to the present.  Since 1999 the median household income, in constant 2017 dollars, never surpassed the 1999 level until 2016.

 

Following the 1957 federal budget surplus the U.S. has run federal budget deficits every year since - except for 1960 & 1969.  It was the 1960s federal government spending that brought the inflation that necessitated two household earners as described above. 

 

The government spending on both fighting an unwinnable war in Indochina & LBJ’s Great Society (especially Medicare, Medicaid, & the expansions of Social Security benefits) ended the economic expansion started by JFK & was the inflation spark that required two paychecks coming in to virtually every middle class household.  Today, the Cato Institute has determined there are 126 taxpayer funded welfare programs that not just the needy are using but opportunistic cunning people who exploit the programs also.

 

Federal spending was 3% of GDP in 1928 – it continued to grow in the 1960s & has a long term average of 21% of a much greater GDP meaning that the federal government has continued to not live within its means. 

 

One source of ready cash that contributed to the inflation rise was the Social Security surplus from payroll taxes that was immediately spent on every program imaginable by a profligate Congress.  Today there is nothing but IOUs in the deceptively misnamed Social Security Trust Fund which is scheduled for book-keeping exhaustion by 2034, @ which time benefits will be reduced, as stated on the personalized Social Security statement that is mailed to everyone starting @ age 25 & is also available online.

 

The Budget Control Act of 2011, better known as the Sequester, was a feeble attempt to control a small portion of federal discretionary spending via automatic spending cuts that would go into effect unless both congressional Democrats & Republicans agreed otherwise.  The Sequester had put caps on discretionary federal spending – but in 2018 Congress raised the caps by $130 billion & just last month Congress again raised the caps $320 billion over the next two years above the Sequester limits.  In essence the Budget Control Act controlled nothing.

 

It was Sunday night August 15, 1971 that Nixon took America off what was left of the gold standard when he announced on national TV (I was watching in Ocean City Maryland) that the Treasury would no longer exchange $35 dollars for a troy ounce of gold, & vice versa.  Forty years later, to the day, the price of gold was $1,740 per troy ounce.  A 1971 dollar has lost 84.1% of its purchasing power – i.e., $1 in 1971 had the same purchasing power as $6.29 today.

 

In the next three years more than half of the nation’s $22 trillion outstanding debt matures.  The weighted average cost of that debt is less than 2%.  If interest rates would rise, say to the still historically low 3% level, interest payments would increase $220 billion a year.  Source Jason Trennert, CEO of Strategas, writing in the WSJ.

 

Professor Friedman taught that the villain is government spending that creates the debt & not the debt itself.  Inflation occurs when too much money chases too few goods.  Inflation follows when too much of the nation’s total available resources are unproductively used by government to produce things of no wealth creative value or as Henry Hazlitt wrote in Economics In One Lesson – “it [is] improbable that the wealth created by government spending will fully compensate for the wealth destroyed by the taxes imposed to pay for that spending.”  Accordingly, government spending provides the fuel that decreases the purchasing power of a nation’s currency that ends up with families needing more than one wage earner to make ends meet.

 

In short, Congress spends too much & that is the root cause why we have so many two income households – the government takes too much of the total resources earned by the private sector that should be available to the private sector where it would be used more productively than it would be by the government. 

 

Below is a graphic that shows the rates of both general inflation & medical care inflation that started in the 1960s & is the reason why both husband & wife work today instead of one of them staying home to raise their children.

Below is a graphic that shows the latest inflation source, college tuition loans, starting in 1990.  It has doubled the rate of inflation of medical care & has quadrupled the rate of general inflation.

And below is a graphic showing that much of a worker’s expected wage increase over the past twenty years went to paying employer-provided healthcare insurance.

The WSJ reports that in 1970, only half the women in the U.S. aged 25 to 54 were in the workforce.  That figure has now risen to 75%.  For men it has moved in the opposite direction, slipping from 96% to 89%.  Women currently make up 46.6% of the labor force, up from 45% in 2000.  In July, the breakdown of workers, 25 years old or older, in the labor force with a bachelor’s degree, was 29.23 million women & 29.07 million men.  This puts 2019 on track to be the first year women make up the majority of the college-educated labor force.  Source BLS.

 

The above statistics are not to be praised as a sign of women's rights or some politically correct equality, liberation, or superiority but rather as an indication of both men & women being forced to go into the labor force to make ends meet because of the inflation resulting from government overspending, as detailed above.  Accordingly, parents have abdicated their parenting responsibility – i.e., the way they raise their children – in order to meet the cost of living.

 

Not only do many children not have the family supervision structure they need they also find themselves separated from worthwhile programs & activities – i.e., they are left isolated online.  Several mass shooters had suffered from being bullied.  With limited family support even their homes were not safe havens when the bullying could continue online nonstop without a break or advice from their parents.  Under these circumstances it is easy to see how mental distress could reach a breaking point for some people.

 

The recent mass shootings in El Paso & Dayton, within thirteen hours of each other, has resulted in both politicians & the citizenry calling for the federal government to do something – anything.  What a sad commentary to turn to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, & Donald Trump for help for a problem that can only be solved by the parents.  And of course the two dozen Democrat presidential candidates couldn’t wait to politicize these tragedies & demonize the NRA & Trump.

 

It is bad enough that the federal government makes a pretense of trying to do something, but even then is it not asking too much that it should @ least propose something that will help?  Not any of the proposed enhanced background checks would have stopped either the El Paso or Dayton mass shootings so they would not have been any help.  Passing more anti-gun & red flag laws will not reduce the carnage.  To put it in terms a dieter can understand – the fork does not eat the cheesecake.

 

Gun violence in Chicago & Baltimore has been infamous for years – Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws but to no avail.  Juarez, Mexico has draconian gun laws but had 1,247 murders last year compared to El Paso with lax gun laws & 23 homicides.

 

Red flag laws mostly act to take away a person’s right to keep & bear arms, without due process of law, based on a prediction of future bad behavior.  This is illogical & shortsighted.  If a person is that dangerous what will stop them from using a knife to kill or driving a car into a nondescript crowd that could just as easily been the target of a mass shooting?  Earlier this month a man in Southern California went on a stabbing spree when he used a machete to kill a 7-Eleven security guard, two people @ the man’s apartment complex, another person outside a Subway restaurant, & injured two others before police arrested him.

 

People who are genuinely interested in expanding red flag laws desire security & safety over liberty – these people have come to take their freedoms for granted which is another dangerous slippery slope.

 

Establishing “gun free zones” in schools or churches merely invites gun violence since a deranged person knows there is no one there to stop them.  Who would put a sign on their front lawn “there is no one home with a gun so you are not in danger to trespass?”

 

In summary, none of the politically correct proposed anti-gun & red flag laws would help solve the mass shootings problem that really has been caused by our own succumbing to the Death Of Democracy principles known by our Founders & Vladimir Lenin as well.  We have lived in a world of One Nation Under Government debauching the currency for over 50 years & the mass shootings is just one of the signs of America’s slide.  Only when we are truthful enough to address this actuality will we have a realistic chance to reduce, if not eliminate, the mass shootings that plague America.