Alan Axelrod - Full Faith and Credit: The National Debt, Taxes, Spending, and the Bankrupting of America

About Full Faith and Credit

What is the national debt? Who loses from it? Who profits from it? Why is it a greater threat to America than international terrorism? In direct, non-partisan language, this book follows the money and finds the answers.

Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialist Each has a laundry list for America on which the slow-motion cataclysm of unsustainable national debt is but a lonely bullet point among dozens of others. Full Faith and Credit zooms in on that point, liberates it from partisan programs and political orientations, expands it, explores it, and explains it.

The book examines key dimensions of our national lifefrom a military-industrial complex more menacing than even Eisenhower could have imagined to a Tower of Babel tax code that covertly translates taxes into secret subsidies. With the aim of converting bystanders into informed advocates of change, Full Faith and Credit is rich with eye-opening data, surprising case studies, and you-cant-make-this-stuff-up examples:

For every official the United States public has elected, its government supports 5000 unelected employees.

$1 billion is the cost to destroy $16 billion in ammunition unneeded by the U.S. military.

$20,973,890,000 is the total taxpayer cost to the Treasury of gambling losses deducted by millionaires. With easy-to-follow graphs and charts, as well as 20 uproarious full-color editorial cartoons drawn from the work of Pulitzer Prizewinning artist Michael Ramirez, Full Faith and Credit locates the tipping point of the $19.4 trillion (and counting) national debt crisis and offers ideas on how to fix it.

About the Author and the Cartoons

Alan Axelrod, Ph.D. , is the author of more than 140 nonfiction books, including Patton on Leadership , Elizabeth I CEO, and all five editions of The Complete Idiots Guide to American History . He has been a creative consultant for the CW, A&E Network, Discovery Channel, Military Channel, American Heroes Channel, and the PBS series American Experience, and a keynote speaker at good-government and business conferences around the world.

The editorial cartoons are drawn from the work of Michael Ramirez . Ramirez is a senior editor and the editorial cartoonist for Investors Business Daily , a Lincoln Fellow, and an honorary member of Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society. He has won almost every journalism award, including two Pulitzer Prizes, the prestigious UCI Medal from the University of California at Irvine, the 2005 National Journalism Award, the 2008 Fischetti Award and the H.L. Mencken Award. He is also the author of the new book Give Me Liberty or Give Me Obamacare.

DEDICATION

To all who wish a brighter future for our children and grandchildren and most especially to my father, Harry N. Abrams, and his mentor, Harry Scherman, whose publishing contributions to the culture of our country have been worth emulating.

Robert E. Abrams

For Anita and Ian

Alan Axelrod

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank my editor, Lynn Northrup, and also the team at Abbeville Press who made this book possible: designer Misha Beletsky and Abbeville vice president Will Lach. My special thanks to Abbevilles chief number cruncher, John Olivieri, who collaborated with me on the tables used in the introduction and the endpapers.

The idea for this book came from Robert E. Abrams, cofounder and CEO of Abbeville Press. I have known Bob for many years as a man with a passion for delighting, dazzling, enlightening, and educating readers. His contributions to this book are very many. More than a publisher, he has been a generous and demanding collaborator.

Alan Axelrod

NOTE : Wherever noted and in blue sidebars like this one, dollar figures for historical revenue, spending, and debt are in billions and have been adjusted for inflation to 2009 dollars.

The economies of the world remind me of a hamper full of dirty shirts. None are clean but the United States is the cleanest of the dirty bunch.

S TEPHEN M AUZY ,
The Worlds Cleanest Dirty Shirt
Wyatt Investment Research
October 18, 2013

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

U PTON S INCLAIR ,
I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1934)

Derivatives are like sex. Its not who were sleeping with, its who theyre sleeping with thats the problem.

W ARREN B UFFETT (2008)

PUBLISHERS

FOREWORD

E ach of us sees life through a personal lens. The lens distorts, biases, filters, and focuses. It selects. It refracts a large part of our character. The more we are aware of the nature of our personal lens, the more we can refine it, even alter it, if we want. The more we can learn.

My lens, in part, is that of a small, entrepreneurial businessman, among whose businesses is publishing. I like reaching an audience and helping talented authors and artists reach their audiencesometimes, oftentimes, a very small audience.

My hope is that, through Alan Axelrods work, this book will reach a large audience. I hope that this book will help us all learn more about the economic aspects of our political and cultural environment here in the United States. I hope it will allow us to refract what we learn through our personal lenses, and then weigh our priorities, so that we can engage in a constructive and informed level of discussion about our best choices in the 2016 election and well beyond.

Managing businesses, employees, suppliers, and customers is hard. Some are better at it than others. I believe the larger the organization, the more complex it is to manage it adequately, let alone really well. Full Faith and Credit highlights the challenge of managing the $4.5 trillion-per-year enterprise called the federal government.

Some people feel that as long as same-sex marriage and a womans right to choose are the law of the land, everything else will work itself out. Others feel just as passionately that these social issues are symptoms of the nations moral decline. Although it can be argued that all politics is ultimately about social issues, Full Faith and Credit is not about these particular social issues. They are important, one way or the other, but addressing themas voters, for instanceto the exclusion of other issues will not ensure the continued existence, let alone the well-being, of our nation.

There are 17 members in my immediate family, including children and their families, and we are all American citizens.