There are lots of issues before us in this election, and I can’t help but think the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the national debt.
It’s $35,681,221,900,999 dollars and climbing, so, let’s say, $35.6 Trillion dollars. That’s over $100,000 for every man, woman and child in our great country, including even the illegals.
It’s over one- and one-half times our Gross Domestic Product. We have spent the future generations wealth. Or we have yoked them with a crushing debt. Or some combination thereof.
Just servicing the debt on this massive amount consumes more money than we spend on the national defense. I have trouble wrapping my brain around this gigantic number. The old trick is to think of this in seconds. Units of time that we all know, so 1,000 seconds ago was equal to almost 17 minutes.
It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds, therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709 years.
Think of it this way – a trillion seconds ago, there was no written history. The pyramids had not yet been built. It would be 10,000 years before the cave paintings in France were begun, and saber-toothed tigers were still prowling the planet, likely preying on humans.
Now, multiply that by 35.6. Our national debt, in seconds would be 1,128,840 years ago. It’s an enormous number. Inconceivable. The Democratic Keynesian economists think it’s not a big deal.
Of course, Keynesians are almost never right when predicting micro- or macro-economic trends, so we need to see what the Hayek and his Austrian economists have to say, and their predictions are dire. We have already seen the economic collapse that would follow a default in Greece. They had the rest of the world, including us, bailing them out.
If we were to run into trouble, we would risk losing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and let’s face it, there is no one capable of helping us out of what would be a dreadful position. There are limited ways we can escape this insanity. We can inflate our way out of it, but that’s a painful option.
Or we can grow our way out (every time we start, we have a change in Washington, and we spend everything we repaid, plus some).
The Democrats think we can tax our way out of this situation, which is a fantasy in itself.
The “rich” only have enough money to support the overgrown beast that is our government for about eight months, and that’s if we confiscate every penny from the 550 billionaires we have for a grand total of roughly $2.5 trillion dollars.
The Republicans have demonstrated that we need limited government to get there. Austerity. We need to spend less.
The problem is that neither party has done a good job of reining this beast in and spending less. They have done an absolutely superb job of raiding the national treasury in a way that helps them get elected.
And hey, let’s face it, they don’t spend OUR money on the right things. Instead, they spend OUR money and run up the limit on OUR national “credit card” doing what gets them elected.
We have given them no other imperative, and in the meantime, they are squandering our children’s and grandchildren’s future. We know the Chinese will be brutal taskmasters if they decide to call the loans we have taken from them at above-market rates.
Our only option is spending less. A lot less and doing it right now.
Being in debt is never good, and at the level our government does so, it could become a national economic hurricane that not even our great nation can escape.
We don’t have a taxing problem. We have a spending problem.
