What got us $14 Trillion of debt? "A perfect storm"

As more Americans have begun looking at both our staggering national debt and huge, continuous yearly deficits, many have started to wonder how the hell the nation's political "leaders" could have put us on this path.

While it's a cliche that money is fungible (so one can't blame just one program for our debt), it's also true that so-called "entitlement programs" now account for over half of all government spending. They're now so vast that if we eliminated all other federal spending, just these programs would exceed national income. So that's a reasonable place to look for starters.

So did no one bother to realistically estimate the cost of the various "entitlement programs?" Or did the pols simply ignore the forecasts and vote for the programs to win their own re-elections? (How typical.)

Whatever the reason, we owe it to ourselves and our kids to find out--and then to create lethal measures to prevent politicians from repeating this disaster. If the U.S. survives the next decade, of course.

For what it's worth, here's what I've found:

When JFK was assassinated in 1963, his vice-president--Lyndon B. Johnson-- stepped into the presidency. Johnson was the antithesis of JFK: Where Kennedy was sophisticated, urbane and charming, Johnson was crude, loud, overbearing. He was the stereotype of the obnoxious Texan, and the only reason Kennedy chose him for his running-mate was that Johnson would win the vital electoral votes of his home state for the Democratic ticket.

It's not an overstatement to say that the northeastern Democratic elites who loved Kennedy hated Johnson--a fact of which Johnson was keenly aware.

Derided by Democratic elites as a crude lout, Johnson quickly began looking for ways to burnish his image. His solution was in ramrodding into law a cause Kennedy had been exploring: creation of a conglomerate of "entitlement programs" aimed at giving money and services to the poor. Johnson called these programs "the Great Society."

Had Kennedy tried to introduce these programs while he was president, it's likely that the normal adversarial American system of government would have forced him to do so incrementally, giving congress and voters a chance to see how well they worked before they were expanded to fatal levels.

But the assassination--essentially broadcast live to the nation--was so devastating that it elevated JFK to virtual sainthood overnight. Once that happened, no congresscritter wanted to be seen as opposing anything JFK ostensibly wanted, so anything that could reasonably be said to be one of his wishes was now a legislative slam-dunk.

Thus the massive edifice of entitlement programs--and the unthinking, financially unsound expansion of older social welfare programs like Social Security--was adopted because of the socio-political equivalent of the perfect storm: The shocking assassination of a young, handsome, charismatic president; the ascension of his crude and widely disliked veep to the presidency; Johnson's overwhelming resentment of his sophisticated and widely loved predecessor and his need to win his party's support, regardless of the cost; and the unwillingness of congressmen to vote against programs said to have been cherished goals of the slain former president.

Against this powerful combination of factors, no cautionary analysis would have ever seen the light of day. It was the perfect storm.

Parents: Show this to your kids and explain it. Because it's absolutely certain that they never learned any of this in school--by design.