Responsible Citizen: Who is going to bail you out?

That’s right, I’m talking to you—who live within your means, who pay your rent or mortgage, who haven’t gone tens of thousands of dollars into credit card debt and never used your house like an atm to buy expensive cars and vacations.

Like it or not—the time is coming when you too, Responsible Citizen, will need a bailout.

Why? Well, let me explain.

For some years we have been taught that the best way to be successful is to go out and borrow as much money as possible. Live the good life: expensive clothes, rich foods, dazzling entertainment. The more leverage, the better. In effect, do everything you can to become “too big to fail.” That way, when the day of reckoning arrives and the bills come due, taxpayers will have to bail you out.

This strategy worked for aig, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s bondholders, and the executives with billion-dollar bonuses at Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the other government-propped-up American financial institutions. Institutions that once bragged to European and other economies that American capitalism was the best because of its no-government-intervention, you-either-make-it-or-you-don’t approach.

These guys paid out billions in profits to share- and bondholders. Tens of billions more went out in the form of bonus checks. But now that it’s time to pay, who has to fish out his wallet? You guessed it: you and me.

Case in point: aig is back at the taxpayer trough—again—after announcing its $61.7 billion quarterly loss yesterday: the largest loss in U.S. corporate history. Now, you and I own 80 percent of aig—courtesy of Congress and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson addressing the problem with a firehose of taxpayer money. Their three previous bailouts, for a total of $150 billion, have since disappeared into the black maw of risky housing investments and derivative hedging contracts, and so aig is asking for a fourth bailout: $30 billion more.

America is about to learn a painful lesson in socialism.

General Motors just visited the taxpayer feed trough again as well. Four months ago, GM won $18 billion from the Treasury—make that, from taxpayers. Now it is seeking $16.6 billion more.

Fannie Mae is back for hay too. The now-government-owned mortgage company is asking for $15.2 billion in bailout funds. Freddie Mac will be back too. Many of the big banks will be heading for the food line again as well.

President Bush approved a $700 billion handout. President Obama has approved $750 billion more.

But the bailout madness doesn’t end there. Lest you think the average American didn’t have a hand in America’s economic woes, remember that just as America’s banks were leveraging themselves up with debt, Joe the blue-collar worker was doing the exact same thing.

For most of American history, consumer debt levels represented less than 50 percent of gross domestic product. Starting around 2000, consumer debt levels skyrocketed—eventually matching the nation’s gdp in 2007.

Such sky-high debt levels happened once before: 1929.

This time, the new debt went to new toys, fancy fancies, the stock market—and yes, the housing bubble. Americans hawked their financial futures to purchase homes that had doubled and tripled in value over just a few short years—homes that would supposedly make them rich. And to get into increasingly expensive homes, people began fudging. They fudged on their income statements. They fudged on their reported assets, and on whether or not they had a car payment or student loans. They fudged on their ages, weight and shoe size too. Loan agents fudged. Real-estate agents fudged. And property appraisers fudged too. But the fudge fest was only beginning.

The banks bundled up all the fudging and sold it to investors, who fooled themselves into believing that bundles of fudge were somehow worth more than individual units of fudge. The rating agencies got in on the fudge action too—somehow the bundles of fudged mortgages were rated aaa, on par with other aaa-rated investments, even though they carried, by some estimates, 100 times the risk.

And where did all the fudging get us?

It got us to the point where then Treasury Secretary Paulson told members of Congress that if they didn’t pass the first $700 billion bailout package, the country faced the economic apocalyptic abyss.

So now, part of the plan is for all those responsible taxpayers who didn’t purchase homes they couldn’t afford to bail out all those “homeowners” who are in danger of losing their overpriced homes because irresponsible homebuyers spent 50, 60 and 70 percent of two incomes to purchase one house. Now the responsible people who didn’t take out half-million-dollar loans get to help pay the mortgages of homeowners who couldn’t live without a fourth bathroom and granite countertops.

That’s what American-style capitalism has come to. The risk-takers get the chance to make a killing, but when they lose, responsible taxpayers are forced to rescue them—lest the whole system implode.

On Wall Street, they call it “privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.”

What a far cry America is today from the principles that helped build this country into the world’s most prosperous nation. The prosperity absolutely came from God and God alone, but He dispensed it through men and women who tried to abide by biblical principles: Live within your means. Don’t covet. You reap what you sow. You are rewarded according to your works.

With those Bible-based principles of success gone, so too are the blessings God gave us.

The situation is a mess, and it is getting messier. This coming year, the government plans to spend the $3 trillion it did last year, plus an additional $1 trillion in stimulus and bailout packages. But the government will only collect $2.25 trillion in taxes. Since there are only about 140 million workers in America, the government’s projected $1.75 trillion in government borrowing is a staggering $12,500 for every person who files a tax return—that is what the most recent budget will cost you. It will cost more if the government is fudging its numbers.

So, again. Who is going to bail you out, responsible taxpayer?

Unfortunately for you, Congress won’t come to your rescue. You will not enjoy the same “too big to fail” perks as the banks, the auto companies or even the upside-down homeowners will have.

The government is broke. It was running massive deficits before the crisis ever struck. And now it is planning the biggest borrowing binge ever to bail out the irresponsible, inefficient and incompetent. The nation’s finances have been pushed beyond the point of recovery.

All the bailing out, and all the number-fudging, might buy a little time. But the nation is bankrupt. And when the rapidly approaching day arrives that America’s foreign creditors come knocking, even those who managed their finances wisely will be sucked down the national drain. No one is willing or able to bail out America.

You can’t fix a system that is founded on debt, greed and fudging. The only way prosperity will return is with a completely new system. The current economic crisis will precipitate a new global economic order, but it will not come about easily. For an in-depth vision of the future economic model, which will soon be forced upon this world, read The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like.