"If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, and 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 and debt, reduced to a level that we can understand."
-- Dave Ramsey
...a family that spends money on their friends, and has the ability to make some of their friends and a whole bunch of strangers give them money to live this way.
And are looking to start doing a little breaking and entering, because, well, they shouldn't have to cut back on anything. It's everybody else's job to enable them.
But they mean well, and are always willing to have Jack there buy you lunch if you're a little down and out. And you think that's a good idea - having other people buy your lunch.
H/t, Ron P. for the Ramsey quote.
Mind you - I don't see how we get out of this mess without some tax increases - but the Tea Partiers were correct to force the issue to be about spending cuts, and get 'em up front (relative paucity they got) before giving on taxes, which is where the fiscal conservatives have been snookered time and time again.
Hope and Change indeed. Yay Yay clap clap. As those fools in congress squabble for null outcomes the leadership is entirely missing. You know Hope is worth nothing without the work and brains behind it. Delivered Change tho hmm. Quite a bit of that.
All the same I wish Americans would look past dear President and the Tea Party. This is far more an American generated problem than anything else so there is a need to do a bit of self examination rather than passing the buck.
US dominance in many areas including the not quite so mighty dollar draw enormous bonus benefits to the US. If/As that dominance slips you will see a secondary hit beyond the damage done by this debt because those bonuses may evaporate. Not only that, there are vultures which hate the US or see it as a ripe piggy. They will swoop if the US weakens too much.
One thing this does tell us is that the Keynesian stimulus gambit did not pay off.
propaganda arm of the DNCdinosaur media?Every penny brought in *will* be pissed away on yet more spending sprees. There never was a "social security lockbox" nor any of the other multitudes of promises made by the pathological liars of congress. Not a penny raised will be used for anything other than yet more pandering and vote buying.
There is absolutely nothing in our history since FDR to say otherwise.
So, we're already in hock up to nearly what we make as a nation, and folks want to just keep playing like all the crap that our money is thrown away on needs to keep going because folk have become comfortable with what's spent on them.
The intellectual inbreeding on this issue has been so horribly intense that the tree thought has become a vine of delusion. Just listening to all the idiocy coming out of the mouths of the talking heads on tv points ever more strongly to the reality that there's no peaceful way out of this hole we've spent the last half century digging for ourselves.