A Culture of Entitlement & Borrowing Part III

    Unfortunately, there are many signs that America has completely transformed itself into an economically ignorant and entitlement-driven culture. One of the great areas of growth for companies providing advertising space is legal ads. While the U.S. unemployment rate soared to well over 10% in 2009 and many domestic companies continued their steady migration towards more employment-oriented jurisdictions, America’s legal industry continues to thrive.

    Ads recruiting new potential tort plaintiffs now literally flood the advertising marketplace twenty-four hours a day. The idea that law firms continuously spend big money to surf for additional legal raw material represents chilling evidence of the insidious nature of the entitlement era. These ads are an essential first step in the manufacturing processes of the legal community. Simply put, strip mining society for successful litigation opportunities is possible because lawyers dominate government and entitlement-oriented juries are widely available to assist in an adjudication process that routinely fleeces so-called deep pockets. The billions of dollars pouring into these plaintiff seeking ads suggests that entitlement mentality exploitation processes are not just economically feasible, they are lucrative for attorneys. The burdens of the tort system are transmitted into the cost of every good and service in the nation.

    Equally amazing are the ads being run by tax liability remediation attorneys. Using the testimonials of actual citizens, this segment of the legal services industry continuously transmits the message that merely with the use of highly trained legal experts, individual responsibilities for paying their personal income taxes can be either greatly reduced or avoided altogether. Naturally, uncollected taxes only add further to the burdens of all citizens through the U.S. government’s borrowing abyss.
    In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 many experts predicted that America would experience a sudden cultural shift away from borrowing. And as 2010 begins, there is growing evidence that millions of U.S. consumers are actually beginning to resist the temptation to borrow and spend beyond their means. However, the policy response of our government to the latest “crisis” explains very clearly how deeply the two national weaknesses (entitlement and borrowing) have become inter-connected in our political culture (see national debt clock here).
    In the face of a problem created by our culture’s excessive use of debt, the U.S. government has aggressively moved to increase the sheer volume of entitlements and increase the level of federal borrowing used to pay for these entitlements. The diagnosis of too much debt and entitlement is being treated with….more debt and more entitlements.

    Until the millions of Americans who are clearly not entitlement-seekers or debt-laden take a vow to demand accountability from government nothing will change. In the meantime, the borrowing capacity of this shrinking group of Americans, people who have chosen to resist the temptation to personally engage in financially-destructive behaviors, will be used to finance the regrettable entitlement and borrowing biases embedded in the government of the U.S. collective. Citizen's anticipating a shift away from this trend would be well-advised to realize that as long as elected officials in the U.S. continue to be rewarded for fostering a culture of entitlements and borrowing, they will continue to maintain the status quo.

    In the areas of finance and economics, the majority of Americans have been insufficiently educated by their parents and the public education system. This explains why the majority of the electorate has not yet rejected policies that indicate a national penchant for entitlements and borrowing is sustainable. And even more sadly for our country, history repeatedly suggests that if a dominant economic national power has collectively for a couple of generations, been more concerned with dividing the existing economic pie than it is with baking more economic pies, an international economic leadership change is pretty close at hand.

    In our previous four part series on China (search at top: Understanding China) we can see that thirty years after culture transforming policies were instituted, China’s population and leadership remains squarely focused on scientific education, hard work, self-reliance, saving, and sacrificing for the future. As such, China is clearly the rising economic power of the world. With American leadership still calling for more borrowing and spending, the nation is still slowly descend into the same trap that has already threatened to destroy Europe.

A Culture of Entitlement & Borrowing Part III