Chaaaarge!!!!...

It's not that I'm opposed to borrowing money. There are times when it is simply a necessity. The problem is, whoever lends it always expects to be paid back. And whenever I borrow money, I'm the one who has to make the payments, so I usually try to make sure I can come up with a way to find enough money for them. If it wasn't for that little detail, I'd probably try to borrow a lot more.

Our Representatives in Washington just increased the federal debt limit to $14.3 trillion, so that they can borrow enough money to hopefully get us through until the end of the year. I imagine it makes it a lot easier knowing they aren't the ones who will have to pay it back.

But then, we may have reached the point where the question is not "Who is going to pay the debt?", but instead, "Can the debt ever be paid?"
This article makes the case that it is mathematically impossible to pay off the debt as it now stands. There just isn't enough money in the country to cover it.

Normally, when there isn't enough money to cover the debt, some of the guys on the wrong end of the line don't get paid.

That doesn't seem to bother our representatives up in Washington. But then, I don't suspect many of them will end up on the wrong end of the line, either.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

My wife informed me the other day that we are cutting back on our Christmas spending this year. Sounds like a good plan to me, although I’ve decided to take a wary “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach to the whole deal. There’s always the possibility that I’ll end up being a real schmuck on Christmas morning if I over-estimate what “cutting back” actually means, maybe even worse than the time I bought her a pant suit that was two sizes too big. Or the time I bought her a new can opener that was just like the one I had given her the Christmas before.

We never have been ones to go overboard buying presents. Socks and underwear have always been a staple. Our children and grandchildren have probably fared better than some and worse than others, but we’ve never bought anything for Christmas that we couldn’t pay for at the time. It seems to work out better that way, and it certainly makes January and February a lot more tolerable.

I’ve heard of people that were still paying for last years presents when they started buying this years presents. I imagine that has to take some of the joy out of giving. Credit and credit cards seem to be the major culprits in the deal. People tend to lose track of what they’re spending if they don’t have to fork over the cash on the spot. A study by Debt.com found that people who pay with credit cards tend to spend about 25% more than people who pay with cash. And then there’s that interest thing to contend with.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas up in Washington, too. They don’t really have a pay as you go system in place up there anymore, and you just about have to believe that our representatives have lost track of how much they’re spending. Our national debt passed $12 trillion sometime last month, but that’s only if you don’t add in our future obligations to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That kicks it up to $60 or $70 trillion, give or take a trillion or two.

Like people who charge more on their credit cards than they pay on the bill each month, the government is spending and adding to the debt more than it is paying on it. By about a trillion dollars a year. And just like those people with their credit cards, it doesn’t make it any easier when you have to pay all of that interest, which in the government’s case is over $1 billion per day.

Of course, we all know that government doesn’t actually pay anything on the debt. Taxpayers do. And right now they’re also paying a lot of interest. In fact, 40 cents of every dollar of individual income taxes collected goes just to pay interest. And it doesn’t appear that the government is being overly frugal with the 60 cents that’s left over, either.

We also know that we aren’t going to be able to pay off this debt. We are going to hand it over to our children and grandchildren. In 10 years it ought to be up around $22 trillion.
If we don’t add anymore spending. And if nobody else loses their job.

Thomas Jefferson had some excellent advice years ago when he said that “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.” Sounds like a good idea to me all year, not just at Christmas.

And if you want to get the kids a little something extra this year, slip a bill in each of their stockings for $39,118.00. That’s each ones share of the federal debt. And be sure to remind them that just like the socks and underwear, it’s gonna be even bigger next year.

Merry Christmas.

On the road again...

I've never been much of a traveler. I can usually find about everything I need within 10 or 12 miles of Hagerstown, and as I've mentioned before, I don't much care for driving on interstates around cities where the posted speed limit is merely a suggested minimum.

Still, occasions tend to pop up where leaving home becomes necessary. A while back, my wife Susan received the honor of being asked to officiate at the wedding of some friends of ours. The wedding was held at the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina last weekend, so we packed our bags and loaded the car.

In order to alleviate some of my traveling anxieties, Susan borrowed a portable Global Positioning System from one of our sons. It's a little black box that plugs into the hole in the dashboard where the cigarette lighter used to be, and tells you when you should turn, how fast your driving, and how far you are from the turn you just missed.

Since I now was going to have two voices in the car telling me where to go, and since I felt the need to identify which voice I was answering, we named the GPS "Maggie", short for it's brand name, punched in our destination and embarked on our adventure.

I knew that State Road 1 was closed in Milton, so I didn't give it much thought when Maggie directed me down US Route 27. Apparently though, Maggie wasn't as smart as she thought she was, given that 27 was also closed. It was one of several instances on the trip when she muttered something unintelligible under her electronic breath, announced that she was recalculating our route, and then instructed me to turn either right or left at my next opportunity. Occasionally things got in such a mess there was nothing to do but make a U-turn and start over.

On the news that evening the report came in that President Obama had announced that the federal deficit in 2010 would most likely be twice as large as he had predicted, and that in 10 years the official federal debt could be $23 trillion.
He didn't seem to be anymore concerned about it than George Bush was when he oversaw the doubling of the federal debt while he was in office.

Turning to the left's version of big government doesn't seem to be anymore affordable than turning to the rights's version of big government. Maybe it's time we turned back to following Constitution's version of limited government.

Right, Maggie?

Maggie?

Maggie?

Roll out the presses...

There certainly are a lot of large numbers being tossed around these days. I remember as a kid being impressed with the thought of Jed Clampitt having a few million dollars. Nowadays his fortune wouldn't operate the government more than a few seconds.

I wrote an article a while back about how hard it is fathom how much a trillion of anything actually is. Like a trillion seconds is 317 centuries. Like a trillion seconds ago it was 29691 B.C.

I don't even want to think about the supposed 5 quadrillion tons that the earth's atmosphere supposedly weighs.

I ran across an article over at Strike-the-Root the other day that examined the governments ability to print enough money to cover the $3.9 trillion in new spending commitments it is making. Each sheet of $100.00 bills contains 32 separate bills. If they print one sheet per second, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year(366 on leap years),it will take about 10 years to print that amount.

I imagine they can fire up some more presses to speed the process along. And they can always hire some more press operators.

I guess those might be some of the jobs this stimulus package is supposed to create.

Rock and roll....

Summit Taylor was the janitor, groundskeeper, and sometimes recess monitor at my alma mater, Millville Grade School. He lived just across the fence on the other side of the big pile of leavings where he dumped the ashes from the coal furnace in the basement of the school building. One day at recess, my old buddy Stinky Wilmont decided to pick up a clinker out of that pile and see if he could throw it over Summit’s garage.

Although Stinky didn’t have enough arm to get the clinker over the roof, he did have enough power to get it to one of the windows on the building. Needless to say, Summit was not impressed with the feat. Neither was Principal Baker, and the entire 3rd and 4th grades were forced to stay in for the next two recesses because of Stinky’s transgression.

I didn’t have any concrete ideas on what constituted justice back then, but I was pretty sure the entire classroom didn’t deserve to be punished because of Stinky’s bad judgment. But, being in the 3rd grade and scared to death of a trip to Mr. Baker’s office, I suffered in silence with the rest of my roommates, and wondered what misery Stinky would visit on us in the future.

As I grew older, and started questioning the accepted social order, I often wondered what would have happened if all of the students who had done nothing wrong, would have simply stood up and walked out when the recess bell rang. Probably the teacher would have told the principal, and probably the principal would have lined us all up for a paddling. But I still think we would have been right, and the teacher and principle would have been wrong.

Later on in school, while studying Greek mythology, we learned the story of Sisyphus. It seems Sisyphus had displeased a couple of the Greek gods, and was sentenced to the task of rolling a huge boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll back down the mountain just before he reached the top. So Sisyphus would walk back down the mountain and start again. Forever.

I always wondered why Sisyphus didn’t just step aside, let the rock roll down the mountain, and go on about his business. Probably wouldn’t have made as good of a story, I guess. But as I remember it was an awfully big rock. And it was an awfully tall mountain.

We’re getting ready to add a few trillion dollars to our federal debt. That debt already stands at over $10 trillion, or about $33,000.00 of debt for every man, woman and child in the United States. But that’s just the debt the government likes to report. According to David Walker, past chairman of the Government Accountability Office, the unfunded liabilities of numerous government programs push the actual federal debt past $50 trillion, putting each citizens debt at over $160,000.00.

Of course, that is assuming that we all share the debt equally. We know that isn’t the case, of course. This year, of the 115 million Americans that file income tax returns, about 46 million won’t pay any income tax at all. That leaves over $724,000.00 of debt for each of the people that do pay. Maybe a little less as long as the other 46 million continue to at least kick in for the Social Security debt. And the debt we don’t get paid rolls over to our grandchildren. At least the ones that will be working and paying taxes.

Which gets me to wondering, could we really blame future generations if they decide they aren’t going to pick up the bill for our ridiculously exorbitant spending policies? After all, they haven’t done anything wrong, and we are handing them an awfully large rock. And an awfully tall mountain.