The Burning Platform

AMERICA, WHEN IT WAS AMERICA

A Childhood in Athens

No Sign of Socrates, Though

By Fred Reed

http://www.fredoneverything.net/AthensChildhood.shtml

January 18, 2014

It is common for aging men, worn by the long years of drinking and skirt.chasing and strenuous dissolution in the fleshpots of Asia, or any available fleshpots, to remember their youth in roseate hues that never were. But, dammit, we really did go barefoot. And had BB guns. And the dog could go anywhere it damned well pleased, and come back when it chose.

Athens, Alabama in 1957 was a small Southern town like countless others in Dixie with a statue of a Confederate soldier on the town square and little evidence of government of any kind, which was well since it didn’t need any. While the South had not fared well in its ardent resistance to Federal regulation a century earlier, still there was little meddling by Washington in my years there. The South’s martial displeasure with federal intrusion was remembered, though: When I moved down from Virginia, I was to other kids “the damyank on the corner” until I learned to wrap words in a comfortable padding of syllables, as God commanded.

On the square. While Southerners are the most patriotic and martial of Americans, they have the least use for Washington. In which I heartily concur. Photos: FOE Staff.

Although my father was a mathematician at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, and perhaps entitled to social pretensions, he didn’t have any. Consequently I lived as a half-wild disciple of Tom Sawyer. So did most of the town’s boys. Come summer, we at first tentatively abandoned shoes. No one thought this odd, because it wasn’t. Soon our soles toughened to leather and we walked everywhere, even on gravel, without ill effect.

And nobody cared. Oh sweet age of nobody cared. Child Protective Services didn’t show up, officious passive-aggressive snots, to carry my parents away. Today they would, droning censoriously of hygiene and worms and crippling cuts from broken glass and parental irresponsibility.

Many of my friends lost feet to these perils. To this day you can see them rolling about in wheel chairs in their dozens.

Foot-nekkid and fancy free, we went to the Limestone Drug Store on the town square, piled our ball mitts and BB guns inside the door, and read comic books for hours. The owner, a frizzzly redhead man in his seventies whom we knew only as Cochie, liked little boys. Today this would be thought evidence of pedophilia and he would be required to undergo therapy and wear an ankle bracelet. Actually, Coochie just liked kids. And since it was his store, nobody at corporate got his panties in a knot because the comic books were read into virtual dust without ever being bought. The federal government had not yet regulated small-town soda fountains to protect us.

Still there, fifty-seven years later. Much changed inside but the current owners, whoever they are, had the decency to preserve the orignial soda fountain.

The devastating plagues that swept the South in those years, mysteriously unrecorded, were doubtless the result of bare feet in Limestone Drug.

BB guns, I said. We all had them. Most were the Red Ryder model, costing I think $4.95 in as-yet uninflated currency. Mine was the Daisy Eagle, a more glorious version with a plastic telescopic sight. Every corner store sold big packs of BBs. We went everywhere with these lethal arms, often with a ball glove hung of the barrel for convenient carrying.

Today children of six years are led from classrooms in handcuffs for merely drawing a rifle (curious in the world’s most militarily aggressive country). I suppose we would have been executed for actually having one. But, as I say, the saving benefits of federal counsel had not yet reached Athens.

What did we do with these weapons? First, we didn’t shoot each other, or anyone else. We weren’t stupid. Stupidity properly comes with adolescence, and then is directed into drink and insane driving, as it should be.

A BB gun provides excellent training in marksmanship because you can see over the sights the little coppery pellet arching into the distance. It produces an eye for elevation and windage that shows up on the rifle ranges of Parris Island.

I remember afternoons of shooting cotton-mouths from the rusting iron bridge over the creek near the Valley Gin Company, no longer e3xistent. (In the South, “gin” means a place that takes seeds out of cotton, instead of vodka made unpalatable by the addition of juniper juice.) Further, we tried to shoot dragon flies that flitted in iridescent blues and greens among the swamp weeds, wings making a papery rustle. Usually we missed. These insects, known in varying locales as the Devil’s darning needles, snake doctors, or ‘skeeter hawks, are elusive.

Today they would be a protected species. Buying a BB gun would require proof of adulthood, capacity would be restricted by federal law to six BBs, the purchase of which would require registration and a waiting period. In 1957 Athens figured that BB guns were none of the government’s goddamed business. The concept has been forgotten.

However, regulation is not without reason. If you walk around the town square today, you will notice that perhaps just over half of the men are blind in at least one eye from BB wounds, as they roll about in wheel chairs because of feet lost to going barefoot.

My pooch at the time was Penny, an agreeable gal dog given to occasional promiscuity. This was only human of her. She was a cross between something and something else, as dogs should be. I do not like snooty purebred dogs who eat only at the finest restaurants and probably have psychiatrists.

At night Penny sometimes slept on the foot of my bed, common in those days. When she wanted to go out, she scratched at the door, and went. I don’t know where she went. She was a grown dog, competent to manage her affairs. When she returned, she scratched, and came in. This did on two occasions result in new little dogs, but no system is perfect

Pretty much identical to our house, now gone, but ours was without the flags.

Today she would require a license, vaccinations, enrolment in Obamacare, and an implanted chip so NSA could protect her from terrorists (always common in Athens). She would have to be constantly on a leash, like all other Americans, and Child Protective Services would carry my parents away for letting her sleep on my bed.

This would be for our own good. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that between 1950 and 1960, 1.2 million Southern children died of dog poisoning. Further, unleashed dogs like Penny frequently killed and ate old people rocking on their porches. I didn’t understand that when Penny licked my hand, she was checking for flavor.

Such was America, when it was America. It was a helluva country, warts and all, and Athens was a helluva childhood. These never will be again, but they were, and for those who knew them, it was enough.

The Primal Bitch of Income Inequality

By Glenn Fairman

http://www.economicnoise.com/

Being an Economic Progressive apparently means rarely having to say you’re sorry. For even when the jig is up in some liberal Promise Zone fantasyland, you’re still the top vulture of the carrion food chain. On the other hand, in the world of accountable men, any CEO or Captain of Industry whose dismal economic track record even remotely resembled Barack Obama’s would have long since been ridden out of town on a rail, after having been regaled in an honorary suit composed of tar and feathers.

But be that as it may, there is to be no relief on the horizon for those who will not bend their knee to Baal, for Progressivism’s most fanatical native son has returned golfed and rested and ready to pontificate on the sinful state of our national covetousness. Like a Tropical Vortex spinning America into a veritable Golgotha of debt and malaise, “The One” has at last come down to us from Mauna Kea with fiery putter in hand. But despite all the manic fanfare heralded by the auspices of swooning damsels and tingling legs, it turns out that Prophet Obama’s 2014 economic prescription calls for more of the same baleful “hair of the dog” from now till 2016, or Doomsday — whichever cometh first.

Ever since he descended from the third heaven on a rainbow in 2008, Obama’s procrustean answer for all that ails America has been an unflinching dose of Keynesian strychnine poisoning. And apparently, we have not suffered enough since he would now have us double down on an economic inhaler spiked with another stimulating dose of Zyklon B. Indeed, this president is in every way imaginable the ideological archetype of pulp-fiction’s second-rate single-minded villain: a Post-Modern Judas who is driven to redouble his perfidious efforts, even as he has forgotten the scope of his ill-conceived aims. Possessing little save the clumsy but calculated weapons of class warfare in his Lilliputian bag of tricks, Obama’s precarious vantage point atop the earth has earned him the demagogue’s dark augury: the unique understanding that he can prevail only by turning man against brother — even if such a contest sets the land aflame.

But even now, as the terracotta foundations of the vaunted House of Soetero are dissolving for all the world to witness, he proudly mounts that pale steed once more to champion the tattered banner of Income Inequality — the Marxist Provocateur’s surest gambit. After having so richly won the incandescent hatred of the waning productive echelons of America, and having purchased and secured the fealty of Wall Street tapeworms and Corporatist “Last Men” with taxes purloined from our nation’s toilers, Obama will once more draw political refreshment from the poisoned well of envy. Having eschewed liberty for equality and desired the flask half empty over the full draught of economic vigor, the Progressive Prince, in the name of debauched compassion, will soon commence again the filling of Progressive rat holes with reams of worthless paper spun from our Federal presses — all at our cooing grandchildren’s expense.

If Obama is to ever keep his ramshackle beast from a crashing ruin, then the redistributed diets of Unemployment and Welfare must become the career paths for men and women with nothing to lose but their dignity, and for no price — save an unwavering loyalty to one’s trusted and benevolent Kenyan pimp. And moreover, on the busted back of a near-terminal American economy that is reeling with nearly twenty percent of its workers unemployed or underemployed, and where EBT cards are as ubiquitous as Kardashians, Obama’s hot pursuit of an additional twenty million (voting) alien mouths to feed is really the only “prudent” policy star to steer one’s true believers by: even if that star be named “Wormwood.”

I would like to say this if I may. In our political science classes we became familiar with rights and duties and how they accompany one another as dual sides of a coin. Both imply obligations that affect the give and take transactions within civil society. But as republics expend their virtue and wax into feral democracies — the final state before servitude, the citizens’ moral duties evaporate in the minds of the immoderate mob, and government becomes the sole bearer of sweets for its spoiled children. Soon, the duty of the citizenry to maintain its own virtue and to uphold its part in the social contract vaporizes the obligation that is incumbent on the bearer of rights, and this breakdown severs the government’s burden to respect those self same rights as they dance a tango of decline. If you do not agree with this analysis, merely look around you at the state of America circa 2014.

Such reciprocation also must apply to economics. If we are to unquestioningly drink in the moral suasion argument that is inseparable from the Progressive’s eternal bitch against income inequality, shall we say nothing about the productive inequality amongst the masses of adult Americans? Is the moral onus of breastfeeding the able-bodied always to remain upon the backs of those who have played the game squarely, and is the servitude of poor wretches laboring in thralldom to the sly and indolent consistent with the ironic legacy of the Great Society: that guilt-stained bordello of misanthropy that has passed itself off as social justice? Since the wisdom of Aristotle has shown us that there is no greater injustice than to judge unequal things equal, how then do we square the incongruity that those who have shirked their responsibility for being productive in their own lives should perpetually receive the pilfered fruit wrung from busy hands? And conversely, how do we square justice if those who have put their shoulder to the plow are compelled to plow all the more for the romantic fulfillment of some Progressive dullard’s moral/political abstractions?

In continuing this thought experiment, what if all that which a people produce is ultimately counterproductive and anathema to the city? Shall the wise regime subsidize the anarchical, criminal, and destructive behaviors that thrive and perpetuate under cover of entitlement? It seems that ignorance and immorality are the two things that are not in short supply amongst those whose hands are perpetually and indignantly waiting to be filled, and who care as little about their hand-out’s origin as they do about their sick and wasted lives that are carelessly lived hour to hour, day to day. The notion that government should condone and succor its blighted creations for the sake of manipulating power is the greatest cynical evil that it can contrive. So often, these moral catastrophes lie soaked in alcohol and seething despair and have little to do with obtaining a recharged EBT card and everything to do with looking into the mirror and perceiving oneself as a societal victim, ad infinitum. Who can deny that when we see the true roots of income disparity in full relief without maudlin sentimentality, such inequality comes fused together with a string of horrid habitual choices that we can trace like Ariadne’s thread back to government’s improvident compassion — a block-headed tutelage for spiritual slavery forged in the lowest regions of calculation and despair.

To the Progressive eye, which sees the very worst in America’s constitutional vision, the future must be redeemed by putting the past to the torch. And if for them this ideological revolution means a moral rebellion against the civilizational ramparts of our national virtues heralding productivity, goodness, and excellence, well, then let the devil take the hindmost. Ordered liberty was never a viable option for a population whose highest aspirations were the relentless pursuit of wealth, the existential pleasures of the listless parasite, or the self-referential life devoted to full-blown narcissism. How tragic that when a people think and live like there is no tomorrow, there frequently is not one to be had. Barack Obama, a political character so naturally predisposed to the art of wielding the hammer of equality, perhaps wonders why it is so monumentally difficult to govern that intransigent half of America who burns white hot for his dissolution. The sage Victor Davis Hanson has put the answer bluntly: “History has shown that a government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.” Mr. Obama, we think that enemy happens to be you.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be reached at arete5000@dslextreme.com and www.stubbornthings.org.

This piece originally appeared in American Thinker

REAL BALL BUSTING

Phila. Police Commissioner Says January 7th Street Incident Remains Unclear

January 17, 2014 4:08 PM

(Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey gestures toward a video replay of an incident that took place January 7th near Broad and Girard. Photo by Mike Dougherty)

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) –Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey did his best today to address an incident in which there are more questions than answers.

According to a published report, a 16-year-old boy who is a straight-A student at Mathematics, Civics & Sciences Charter School suffered a ruptured testicle during a patdown by police at 15th and Girard on January 7th.

The boy, Darrin Manning, underwent emergency surgery the next day at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

However, police commissioner Charles Ramsey says the boy and his family have yet to file a formal complaint and have yet to speak with the police department’s Internal Affairs division about the incident.

“We want to know what happened,” Ramsey said today. “This is a young man with no history in terms of negative contact with the law. My understanding is he is a good student. I don’t know what took place, and I’m not in a position to say at this point in time because I don’t have all the facts.”

Ramsey showed reporters video of the incident from a police camera. But the coverage is intermittent because the camera had been set to automatically pan back and forth across the intersection every ten seconds.

From what was shown, it looked like a routine patdown and struggle between a pair of officers and a young man.

Ramsey says the abuse accusations are in media reports.

“An allegation as I read it in the paper, the boy hasn’t said anything to us officially. So I’m only going… this is third party. So take it for what it’s worth. I don’t know. This is coming through someone else who apparently spoke to him and then wrote about it. Okay?” Ramsey said.

“Is that during the course of a search, he was grabbed by the genitals and there was a yanking that took place. And according to what I’m also hearing from a medical report is that a testicle was ruptured. Now how that took place, when it took place, who may have been involved… and I don’t know the answer to any of that. And again, this is through other sources. This is not the result of a statement. We need a statement. We need to know what happened. And the person best suited to tell us that is the person who was injured,” Ramsey said.

In that report, the teen says a female officer is the one who searched the boy. Ramsey has pulled one female officer from the street until Internal Affairs completes its investigation. In the video, it appears she wasn’t even involved in the struggle with the boy. She is seen keeping passersby from getting too close to the tussle.

The teen is now facing three misdemeanor charges, including resisting arrest. Police say they’ve tried to speak to the victim’s family, but they refuse to comment as advised by their lawyer.

Eyewitness News spoke to the teen’s lawyer, who says the family will speak only if the charges are dropped.

Meanwhile, Ramsey says anybody who witnessed the incident is asked to call police to help them piece together the facts. But most of all, he just wants the boy to speak with police and tell them his side of the story.

PEOPLE OF WAL-MART – WE’RE ALL DOOMED

Is there a FUPA season? I mean, if I had to guess I’d say the springtime due to excess winter weight being gained unnoticed but I kinda have a bad “gut” feeling that we can’t limit these atrocities to just one time of year.

What’s the point of having underwear on if the world doesn’t even know you’re wearing them? These fine ladies are forward thinkers I say. I’m tired of spending my good money on some stylish undies only for them to go unnoticed. Who’s with me?!?!…nobody? Ok, nevermind then.

Attention shoppers, we have a special on parties located in every frickin’ aisle this dude goes in!!!!!

HA! Ok, when you come down from your incredible level of disbelief and disgust in humanity let me know which one you think is worse.

That will certainly deter anyone thinking about breaking into your car. I know I wouldn’t go near it now just because I’d assume you also have a bear trap on the seat cushion or something. Maybe our friends over at whitetrashrepairs.com could help let us know where this security system ranks in their books.

What’s so creepy about having a homemade shirt with multiple pictures of Winona Ryder on it? Oh, everything? Yeah that’s what I figured. Not stalkerish at all.

Who doesn’t like a classic Battle of the Sexes matchup? For this bout we’ve got a couple of over-the-top mooners. So make sure you pick a side before you hurriedly look away.

I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh and how his wife hates that he buys his pleated khakis for $8 at Walmart. Obviously the reason you’ve heard about that is because Sportscenter is less about sports and more about useless crap. However, we here at POWM are all about useless crap that happens at Walmart, so we’d like to say thanks to Jim for getting caught in the act and remember $8 khakis are still 1,000X better than Belichick’s awful cutoff hoodies.

Nothing says “I’m cheap as hell” like homemade bumper stickers! Also, if you need to resort to making homemade bumper stickers about people being on your ass so much, chances are good the problem is you.

Someone asked me if there is anything better than a rat tail and to be honest I was stumped. I assumed there was not. Then BOOM! Right in my face I get hit with the Siamese twin rat tail and it turns everything I thought I knew about this world upside down.

Ummm ok, couple of ladies on the prowl that might have just missed their prime hunting season by a few decades. But perhaps these cougars still got some bite left? Anyway, I’m sure there are such things as a GILF, not sure these two fit the bill but I don’t know what else to call them when I make you pick one.

Okay, yup I see it’s suppose to be ‘Ducks’ but that’s a little too close for comfort for the kiddos. However ma’am, you don’t get to use that excuse. Your shirt is clearly expressing joy over a poop.

Hey, real men wear pink capris!…not real manly men, but yes technically still male.

I’ll tell ya what buddy let me go ahead and take a worldwide vote and see who all wouldn’t want to be born a white male in America. I’m sure you and the 3 other idiots will be new best friends. Geez, this guy would hit the lottery and bitch about the taxes.

Well that’s certainly a different approach to looking foolish. Totally successful by the way, but definitely a different route there. You’re a pioneer of foolish!

You look like you messed up being a juggalo, which is about the saddest, most depressing thing I could think of saying to someone else.

Hell ya! ‘Bout time Walmart hired a real gardener to work there. I can’t wait to talk to you all about your bare white pasty tulips.

You’d figure that black hole would have sucked in that excess thigh cheese.

KRUGMAN CALLS HIMSELF AN IDIOT

Krugman Can’t Understand How Someone Could Be So Stupid As To Believe What He Used To Believe

Submitted by Robert Murphy via The Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada,

Over at CafeHayek, Russ Roberts is mystified at a recent Paul Krugman blog post. Concerning the debate over whether the US federal government should extend unemployment benefits, Krugman wrote on January 12:

There’s a sort of standard view on this issue, based on more or less Keynesian models. According to this view, enhanced UI actually creates jobs when the economy is depressed. Why? Because the economy suffers from an inadequate overall level of demand, and unemployment benefits put money in the hands of people likely to spend it, increasing demand.

You could, I suppose, muster various arguments against this proposition, or at least the wisdom of increasing UI. You might, for example, be worried about budget deficits. I’d argue against such concerns, but it would at least be a more or less comprehensible conversation.

But if you follow right-wing talk — by which I mean not Rush Limbaugh but the Wall Street Journal and famous economists like Robert Barro — you see the notion that aid to the unemployed can create jobs dismissed as self-evidently absurd. You think that you can reduce unemployment by paying people not to work? Hahahaha!

Before continuing, let’s be clear at the rhetorical devices Krugman uses here. First, he sets it up as the “standard view” that extending unemployment benefits (in a depressed economy) will boost job growth, through Keynesian demand-side effects.

Then, Krugman racks his brains trying to figure out how somehow could possibly disagree with this “standard view.” He says “I suppose” you might worry about the larger budget deficit that this would cause. He doesn’t offer any other possible mechanism by which someone might oppose it.

Finally, Krugman says that that’s not the argument that opponents are using. Instead, they are relying on a supply-side argument, claiming that it would reduce the incentive to work if you paid people not to work. In the context, it is clear that Krugman thinks this is NOT a good objection to the “standard” Keynesian view.

Against this backdrop, then, Russ Roberts is simply astounded because we can turn to Paul Krugman’s own (recent) books to elucidate this very argument–the one that “right-wingers” such as Robert Barro are advancing, much to Krugman’s horror. For example, in the 2010 edition of Krugman’s Essentials of Economics he writes:

People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try to find a job, or may not try to find one as quickly as they would without the benefit. Ways to get around this problem are to provide unemployment benefits only for a limited time or to require recipients to prove they are actively looking for a new job.

And, in the 2009 edition of Krugman’s textbook Economics he writes: “Generous unemployment benefits can increase both structural and frictional unemployment. So government policies intended to help workers can have the undesirable side effect of raising the natural rate of unemployment.”

So we see here, that the type of supply-side argument that Barro et al. bring up is one that Krugman himself endorses. Indeed, this is literally the “standard view on the topic.”

To be sure, a Keynesian like Krugman could argue that in the middle of a big economic slump that such supply-side issues are of only minor importance, and get trumped by demand-side factors. But that’s not at all the argument Krugman is making in this latest blog post. Instead, he is making it sound like Barro et al. are grasping at straws, and not even relying on a coherent argument (such as fear of bigger deficits) when trying to oppose extension of unemployment benefits.

Krugman does this in other contexts, too. To take just one other example: He has coined the terms “confidence fairy” and “invisible bond vigilantes” to mock economists who believe that investors might worry about rising government debt levels, and consequently favor faster action on bringing down deficits even though market interest rates are quite low for US government debt. Yet back in 2003 Krugman wrote:

With war looming, it’s time to be prepared. So last week I switched to a fixed-rate mortgage. It means higher monthly payments, but I’m terrified about what will happen to interest rates once financial markets wake up to the implications of skyrocketing budget deficits.

My point in the present post isn’t to accuse Krugman of outright contradictions, or to say he’s forbidden from ever changing his mind.

Rather, my point is that Krugman frequently accuses his opponents of being stupid and/or evil, when they present a view that he himself advanced in other circumstances. His typical readers would have no idea that Krugman once worried about bond vigilantes, or that his books lay out the standard case for why generous government unemployment benefits might contribute to structural unemployment. No, Krugman has led such typical readers to believe that anyone espousing such views is either a complete idiot–immune to theory and evidence that we’ve had since the 1930s–or is a paid shill who hates poor people.

CLIP’S SATURDAY MORNING MONTAGE

My fellow monkeys – It’s a generally accepted fact that we like guns. We also enjoy seeing maroons fuck up. Here, for your entertainment I would like to present 9 minutes of maroons with guns and they’re doing exactly what you’d think they would do. Fucking up with guns!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmtOEI7sAAs

THANKS CHINA!

The government signs people up for welfare, gives ’em food stamps, free cash, free housing, free healthcare, free phones, free transportation. Over 100 million people are on welfare alone. And 12 million on disability, and 30 million union government drones (soft welfare), and all the pensions. It’s called “stimulus” by Obama and the liberal progressive socialists. And paying people infinite unemployment benefits “creates jobs”. It’s all become part of the normal USSA lexicon.

Thank God for China, taking our IOU’s for there products, and loaning us money. It’s a great big circle jerk: FSA gets EBT cash and SNAP; goes to Wal Mart and spends it all; 80% of the products at Wal Mart are made in China; China gets the cash; China loans the cash back to the USSA to redistribute to the FSA; and the whole cycle starts again. The only problem is our debt. But idiots like Krugman say the debt doesn’t matter. So thanks China, for loaning us money and allowing socialism.

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How China helps pay for Medicare, Welfare, U.S. aircraft carriers
By Rick Newman

Chinese holdings of U.S. federal debt hit a new record high toward the end of 2013. We should probably be grateful.

At the end of November (the latest data available), China held $1,317,000,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities. If all those zeroes make your head swim, that’s about $1.32 trillion, which exceeds the prior record, from 2011. China has been the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt since 2008, when it overtook Japan, which is now No. 2.

Chinese holdings of U.S. debt strike some people as a national-security vulnerability, but that’s largely a myth fed by fear-mongering xenophobes. For one thing, the debt held by China only amounts to about 7.6% of the entire $17.2 trillion in U.S. debt. About two-thirds of the national debt is held in the United States, with roughly 45% of that held by government trust funds and other federal agencies, much of it taxpayer money slated to be spent on Social Security and other entitlements.

Borrowing from all sources, including China, also helps Washington pay for more programs than Americans finance on their own through taxes. A trenchant irony of China’s lending to the United States is it helps pay for aircraft carriers, fighter jets, missiles and other military hardware that would menace China if there were ever a standoff between the two nations.

“One big pot of cash”

Funds from China also help pay for Medicare, welfare, highways, education grants, prisons, food stamps and most other things the federal government spends money on. A few programs — most notably, Social Security — have a dedicated source of funding. Medicare is partly funded that way, but money for some parts of the popular healthcare program for seniors comes from the Treasury Department’s general fund. For the most part, money from taxes and borrowing goes into the same pool at the Treasury, with no distinctions on how dollars from different sources are spent. “Whether the payments are derived from debt or taxes, it’s all one big pot of cash,” says Deborah Lucas, a finance professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

China’s holdings of U.S. debt may actually be a bigger worry for China than for America. “When people ask ‘how bad would it be for the United States if China withdrew its money,’ the answer is, ‘how bad would it be for China if the United States went bankrupt?’” says Richard Kogan of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “China has a big stake in the solvency of the United States. They want us to pay all their principal and interest and keep buying the stuff they make.”

There’s little or no evidence, in fact, that China’s foreign-debt holdings have ever been used for political purposes. China mostly invests its reserves the way any nation seeking financial stability would.

The vast scale of borrowing by the U.S. government is a different story altogether and a legitimate worry. Washington has made halting progress on its debt recently, with the annual deficit dropping from $1.1 trillion in 2012 to $980 billion in 2013. That should fall to about $860 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and perhaps lower if the economy exceeds expectations and tax revenues rise.

There’s still no plan, however, for addressing federal budget gaps that are expected to explode starting around 2020, as spending on retiring baby boomers skyrockets. With luck, China will still have a lot of money to invest by then — and remain in an accommodating mood.