The debt crisis has been a recurring theme among Americans since it exceeded $1 trillion. Now that the debt is on its way to $15 trillion, some members of Congress have used the debt ceiling raise to create a snowballing crisis.
This is standard practice in the new Washington. The Democrats have learned to take a page out of the Republican's playbook and they have learned the best way to pass legislation is to create fear among the public.
The following are three examples of how Congress and the White House have forced legislation through the spread of fear. The media are the conduit that drives the public into a frenzy and once the public is on board with the particular party line, it is a powerful influence on the masses.
The Stimulus Plan 2009 -- February 2009
President Obama said the Stimulus Plan of 2009 was essential to get the country back to work. Promises made of shovel ready jobs as soon as the Stimulus bill passed never materialized but Obama said later, "Those shovel ready jobs were not as shovel ready as we thought."
According to the site that tracks the Stimulus, Recovery.gov, the government has dispersed $787 billion but unemployment still hovers around the 10 percent mark. The pressure to pass the bill to stimulate the economy actually had an adverse effect on the private credit market since the government took nearly a trillion dollars out of the system.
2008 The Great Bank Bailout -- October 2008
The banking industry scared Congress into bailing them out of a mess they created themselves. In 2008, banks held billions of dollars of toxic assets acquired through predatory lending and other borderline legal activities. The Troubled Asset Relief Program bailed out the entities who created the latest recession in the United States.
The Federal Reserve told Congress if they did not bail out the banks they would fail and the country would be thrown into a global recession. The government distributed $700 billion in the first TARP relief and then Bank of America received another $142 billion and Citbank received $280 billion more according to Propublica's accounting of the bailout. The Federal Reserve told Congress the banks were too big to fail. They were also too big to pay the United States taxpayers back with readily available credit.
2003 Invasion of Iraq in Search of WMD's -- March 2003
The United States had invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to eliminate the Taliban and the terrorist cells and disciples of Osama bin Laden. The goal of that war was to find and kill Osama bin Laden. The United States invasion of Iraq happened based on testimony and claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The George W. Bush White House pushed Congress to sign off on the invasion in a short period of time, saying there was impending danger with Hussein building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. When the troops arrived in March they could find no nuclear weapons and no delivery systems in the country. The George Washington Institute detailed the lead up to the war and the failure to find the WMD's.
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