Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Can They Not Comprehend?
Most of us have difficulty in comprehending the magnitude of our country’s debt simply because it is hard to imagine a ‘million’ let alone a ‘billion’ or a ‘trillion’. A quote attributed to Dave Ramsey follows and seems to put it all in perspective for us normal Americans:
"If the US Government was a family—they would be making $58,000 a year, spending $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand."
When we see the continual posturing by our elected representatives in Washington, D.C., if we think of the debate in these terms, maybe we can better understand.
As a matter of fact, if our elected representatives were able to see this and absorb it maybe they could actually understand better what it is they are doing TO us versus doing FOR us. That is the value of a Ron Johnson being sent to Washington since he lived in the real world until a few months ago and he gets it.
Political posturing is keeping us from finding the solution, not helping us to find a solution. The solution is simple: we simply cannot continue to spend what we don’t have even as we must question what we really need versus what we are told we need. Tricky budgeting and false cuts aren’t the answer.
Families can pretty well come to understand their situations; at least most families can do that. Once we’ve maxed out the credit card limits, we are done. (In reality, once we’ve accumulated so much debt that we can’t make the credit card minimum payments any longer, we are done.)
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