The Ultimate Problem With The American Government’s Spending Addiction
Our Founders knew this would be a problem and prevented it, but the New Deal Supreme Court dishonestly blew past all constitutional limitations.
Ted Noel | January 17, 2026Whenever we explore the causes of a bad event, it’s useful to turn our time machines backwards until we reach the original action that started the chain of events. We can then trace forward step by step until the point where the final problem becomes inevitable. This is called “critical incident analysis,” and is beautifully illustrated by the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 into the Everglades on December 29, 1972.
The proximate cause of 101 fatalities was the plane’s impact with terrain. But the crash began minutes earlier as the crew lowered the landing gear while preparing to land. The nose gear light was burned out, so it did not illuminate, suggesting to the pilots that the gear had not properly locked down. The crew followed multiple steps to troubleshoot the issue. Both pilots became obsessed with keeping the gear down, so no one was actually flying the plane. They left George (the autopilot) in charge of flying a holding pattern at 2,000 feet.
At some point while they were rummaging around, George went to sleep, probably after someone bumped the control column and disconnected him. With no one flying the plane, it slowly descended. As the non-flying activities continued, the L-1011 suddenly became a very expensive airboat.
Every step was a critical incident, because at each of the many decision points, one choice could have been made that would have avoided the accident. If just one pilot had remained focused on the controls and instruments, all those people would have landed safely in Miami.
We have another crash impending, and it involves the ship of state. There have been multiple warnings for a long time. Our national debt is unsustainable, but that’s only the fever that indicates an underlying illness.
We now know that various Democrat enterprises were funded through USAID. The wailing and gnashing of teeth over eliminating that money laundering told us all we needed to know. Multiple posters on X are suggesting that all our $36 trillion debt is due to fraud. While that has some plausibility, we only need to look at Minnesota, Ohio, California, and Medicaid to get a general idea of reality. The fraud numbers are huge, but as yet undetermined.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/01/the_ultimate_problem_with_the_american_government_s_spending_addiction.html
