Money doesn't grow on trees. It’s a simple concept, yet the government seems incapable of understanding it. The debt ceiling issue is a battleground, it is a facade subverting the real issue, the debit is out of control. The average national debt per American is roughly $53, 400; that's 35% more than Greece. The average consumer debt per household in America is $193,827. Allowing a country to run with such high debt is reckless and scornful. The grim reality faced by Americans today, is that without money, and with average debt so high our chances for survival are on equal foot with dodos. The debit isn't going to disappear, unless responsible leaders cut back on spending. It's time to face the issue and elect officials willing to cut back on spending.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Time to stop spending
Money doesn't grow on trees. It’s a simple concept, yet the government seems incapable of understanding it. The debt ceiling issue is a battleground, it is a facade subverting the real issue, the debit is out of control. The average national debt per American is roughly $53, 400; that's 35% more than Greece. The average consumer debt per household in America is $193,827. Allowing a country to run with such high debt is reckless and scornful. The grim reality faced by Americans today, is that without money, and with average debt so high our chances for survival are on equal foot with dodos. The debit isn't going to disappear, unless responsible leaders cut back on spending. It's time to face the issue and elect officials willing to cut back on spending.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is cool: http://ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-david-graeber-debt-first-5000-years
ReplyDelete"Debts are always negotiable. They’re not really sacred. What they are is a promise. Now it is true that one’s honor is bound up in promises, but when you think about it, promises almost by definition are renegotiated or can be renegotiated if they are between two honorable people and their situation changes. The strange thing about debts is that once number enter in, once you can quantify exactly who owes what to whom and how much, they become impersonal. You don’t have to think about the other person’s situation, and you can transfer them. Of course, if I make you a promise, you can’t give that promise to someone else, but a debt, you can. In a way, that’s all that money is, is circulating promises, circulating debt. Now, when it is a matter of debts between rich and powerful people, this is what happens anyway. We saw it in 2008, of course, when AIG was several trillion dollars in trouble or whatever it was. Well, they figured something out. They played around with the numbers, they adjust things, they do something with the Federal Reserves, suddenly the debt’s gone."
…
"For the really big players, that is always the case. There is always a way to work something out, readjust the numbers, play around with interest rates, play around with money production. There’s a way to do it. So what you see historically is, that’s always the case between the big players, but it’s only when you have debts between the big players and the little players, between AIG and you, that suddenly debt is treated as a sacred obligation. How could you even imagine breaking that, or between a poor country and a rich country. If Madagascar owes money to the U.S., that’s a sacred obligation. If the U.S. owes money to China, well, we can play around with that."
I'd almost be okay with raising the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting if that would guarantee a balanced budget afterward. Unfortunately, it does not guarantee that by a longshot. There is always colorful rhetoric about why we should spend $X and never cut funding for $Y because of some focus group that "really needs it." The sad thing is that everyone is worse off because of the debt, not better off.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated your comments. Maybe the budget cuts should come from the top, fire congress! OK, not really. But they definitely do need to grow up and realize what most of us learned by the time we were ten: when there is not money to be spent, you can't buy anything.
ReplyDelete