Let me give a simple example, simple because that is all I could understand. Let’s suppose I earn $3,000 a month, but I spend $5,000. After two years, I will be almost $50,000 in debt. What to do? “Ah,” I say, “I will go to the bank and borrow $100,000.” So, stupid bank loans me the money and I am now almost $150,000 in debt (rounded off so I can understand). I get a raise to $4,000 a month. “Ah,” I say, “more income. I can now spend $6,000 per month.” After two more years, I am now $200,000 in debt (not counting interest on my loan). What to do? “Ah,” I say, “borrow more money.” I borrow $300,000 to cover the $200,000. Now I am $500,000 in debt. And so on it goes until I file for bankruptcy.
You can’t get out of debt by going deeper into debt.
The honorable thing to do, of course, is to quit spending more money than I take in and pay off the money I have borrowed. It isn’t wrong to borrow money. Sometimes it’s necessary (buy a house, buy a car, etc.). What’s wrong is to borrow the money, but never pay it back. That is, basically, what thieves do.
Kevin McCarthy just gave Joe Biden $4 trillion more of your great-great-grandchildren’s money, which Joe will delightfully spend on things that are nowhere in the American Constitution and that the government has no business spending money on in the first place. McCarthy got a few elephant peanuts in return, but nothing that will solve anything. It was—totally unsurprisingly—another cave by the vapid, gutless Stupid Party.
McCarthy should have said one thing, and never backed down from it. “We are going to start paying back all this money we have borrowed. We are not raising the debt limit one thin dime. Government, live within your means like average Americans are required to do.” That’s what he should have said, but that would have meant doing the right thing, which Congress almost never does.
We might have had to quit spending billions on a useless war in Ukraine. Umm…how many of you reading this have a billion dollars in your treasury to send to Ukraine? Or anyplace else, for that matter.
Do you know how much $1 trillion is? $36 trillion? Well, let me explain, though I don’t think this will really help any of us fully comprehend the magnitude of what America’s Congress has done to her people.
Count to 1,000. I’ll wait....finished? Now, count to 1,000 and do it 1,000 times. Now you have counted to 1,000,000 (one million). Count to 1,000,000 and do that 1,000 times. Now, you have reached 1,000,000,000—one billion. Count to one billion 1,000 times. Can you do that? If you can, you have reached one trillion. Or you can count to one million a million times, or you can count to one thousand a billion times and you will arrive at the same place. Now count to one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) 36 times and you will know how much total debt the United States government will have accumulated by the next time they decide to raise the debt limit again—AFTER next year’s election. Utter, complete irresponsibility.
But we elected those people. Nobody’s fault but ours.
Let me end this with a quote from historian Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler, made almost 250 years ago: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse [money] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
We really should learn from history. But we don’t.