I have turned over the more mundane things like making the mortgage payment, the insurance payments, the car payments, etc. to my wife while I work on the bigger things like the National Debt, the new 2012 federal budget, and a resolution to the debt ceiling limit. In comparison to the work of the government, my puny little payments are a distraction. Yes, I could lose my house or cars if we don’t make the payments but what are these things compared to the big National issues.
When my wife asks where the money will come from, I just tell her that we will run up a deficit and let our grandchildren worry about it. “But” she says, “the bank wants its money now?” I tell her, “look I can’t worry about this chump change. I am concerned about saving $1.7 trillion dollars over the next 10 years.” Mr. Obama is worried about the big picture and so should I. My wife keeps bringing me back to the reality of the day to day issues that we all face. We need gas in the cars, the kids need school supplies, we need groceries and bills have to be paid.
I ask myself, how did we ever get so far in debt in this country? Then I realize that we have never been out of debt. It has become a way of life. We started 200 hundred years ago in debt and we have just kept it going. It used to be that starting a war would distract us from the internal issues of debt. But we have two big wars going now. Can we afford to keep these wars going? Absolutely say the Department of Defense people. We do not want to appear weak to the rest of the world do we? Is it important that we have an F36 plane to replace our current F35 plane even at the small cost of $15 million each?
Where is our friend Ben Bernanke in all this? Why is Ben not on the TV with Representative Boehner and President Obama? I guess that Ben has to be asked to speak. At least that is the way it appears. I wonder if Ben ran out of suggestions when the discount rate hit zero? Does it matter to Ben if we as a country are so deep in debt that we can’t send out our Social Security checks or pay our military? Where was Mr. Bernanke and his predecessors when the Congress raided the Social Security trust fund?
I keep trying to remain focused on the big picture. McDonalds is hiring but maybe this is not enough to bring down our unemployment. The cities are broke, the States are broke so who is going to do the hiring? I guess it is the small business owners as long, of course, as they are not so big to own or lease a corporate jet. Something tells me that our current economic mess is more than just spending 40% a day more than we bring in.
Could it be that our government is too big? The fellow across the street from me owns a small business. He tells me that he struggles every day to keep it small. I was shocked. Why would he not want to hire more than 24 people? He tell me that when he hires the twenty-fifth person, he enters a world of new government regulation that would require hundreds of new taxes and forms as he then is no longer a small business. I struggle to remain focused.
