Don’t you wish you could just raise your limit?
This morning Tim Geithner helped the White House unveil a $3.8 trillion government budget for the coming fiscal year. If approved, the fiscal year 2011, which starts in October, will ring in a record $1.6 trillion deficit.
Has anyone pointed out that close to half of next year’s Federal budget is freakin’ borrowed?
And then consider this:
The U.S. Senate voted last week to raise the limit on how much the government can borrow to keep itself running, a move that while necessary has become highly political. Senators voted 60-39 to increase the ceiling on the nation’s debt by $1.9 trillion, boosting the government’s borrowing power to a total $14.3 trillion, the highest in history.
But they really didn’t have a choice:
Speaking in favor of raising the debt limit, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said there was little choice: “The money has been spent and now it must be repaid. We have gone to the restaurant, we have eaten the meal, and now the only question is whether we will pay the check. It is that simple.”
And billions of what they intend to borrow next year will be to create jobs. Does it really make sense to borrow money to put the unemployed to work doing jobs that our economy says aren’t worth doing – because if they were worth doing there would be a demand for them and THEY WOULD ALREADY EXIST! Why don’t we just do what the Soviets did and give everyone a job. We’d have full employment then. But wait. That would be socialism. And Americans are capitalists. But capitalism is like… like… survival of the fittest – let the strong survive. And recessions are really just corrections according to the rules of capitalism. But what if you don’t let a correction correct? Don’t you just make the ultimate correction worse? Like the drunk who drinks more because he’s beginning to sober up and his head feels like it’s about to explode.
We’ve all had personal recessions. Like when you’ve still got month left over at the end of the money. It means you’ll spend the next few days in a recession, eating peanut butter and jelly samiches, until you get paid again. You could borrow some money, but hey guess what… you’re just borrowing from another paycheck. And if you do it too often you could get behind two paychecks… or three… or if you’re the U.S. Government… a whole freakin’ three year’s worth of paychecks.
Yep… they raised the debt ceiling to 14.3 trillion dollars. And coincidentally, the projected GDP for 2010 is the same amount – 14.3 trillion! Which isn’t really like Uncle Sam’s annual “paycheck”, but rather every goddamn dollar’s worth of total goods and services produced in the U.S. in a single year. The paycheck would be more on the order of… well… the 3.8 trillion dollar budget they announced this morning.
So what that means in terms we can understand is that they’ve borrowed… let me do the math here… 14.3 divided by 3.8 equals… holy crap! That’s 3.76 years worth of paychecks! I think that might be financially irresponsible. Or more like out of control.
Maybe I’m wrong but it seems like America’s problem is debt. They’ve spent too much time on the midway. Just look at this chart. If you turn it upside down you’ll see American’s are falling off a cliff, but guess who lands on the rocks below. Our children (if you’re my age) and grandchildren. 
So if debt is the problem does it make sense to rack up another trillion dollars worth? And even if it was the answer, would it make sense to let the morons in Washington decide where to spend it. For example they’ve budgeted $734 million to install 1,000 new full body scanners at airports. Why?
Because some nutjob stuffed his panties full of pentaerythritol tetranitrate and got past those geniuses at airport security. Personally I don’t think he could have brought down an airplane. I mean seriously… look at the photo. There is, however, little doubt that he could have done irreparable damage to his dick.
But hey… thanks to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab they are now hiring at the body scanner factory.