The "Financial Crisis," which is being described as the worst financial dilemma since The Great Depression, has been on my mind - A LOT. Even after stewing over it for a couple weeks, I can hardly discuss it without getting fired up. It is like discussing a recent argument before you have had enough time to really calm down. You know the type, where everything you say only gets you more riled up and angry. So if I storm off before I finish, then please forgive me.Money brings happiness is the epic lie that is bought and sold by Americans to Americans around the clock (don't worry we are generously sharing it with the rest of the world too). It is a foundation of advertising and is subtlety shown on televisions and movie screens even when commercials are not. It is hawked in the suburbs, on the freeways and at my last high school reunion. Americans have bought the lie so fully that money has become the tool of measurement for how "well off" our fellow Americans are. This isn't even a very good lie. We see examples of its deception all around us, so much so that even reading it we immediately lump ourselves into the category of enlightened souls who don't buy into it. But is that true? Have we really declined the lie? Don't we think that if the house was a little bigger or the car a little nicer or our clothes a little better then we would be happier. Yet each upgrade does nothing to permanantly change our overall satisfaction. We get a momentary buzz and then go on to look for our next fix.
Our greed has made even us uncomfortable. However, rather than quell the greed, we have shifted our paradigm to accommodate our greed by commuting our wants to needs. Americans don't even know the difference between wants and needs anymore. Could I really not survive without cable/dish, another cell phone, another car, a pedicure, a new <fill in the blank>? Really? Would it kill me? And so we change our language to obscure the truth. "I want" becomes, "I deserve." Things that used to be classified as an extra or something we want is now justified because we "deserve" it.
So Americans buy what they cannot afford. When I went to buy a car, most dealers could not understand the concept of negotiating the price of the car. They always wanted to negotiate the monthly payment. "How much do you want to spend a month?" The exasperated salesman would plead. Americans define what they can afford by whether they can make the minimum monthly payment. This might seem reasonable to many, but what usually gets neglected is an accurate calculation of what they really need left over for daily expenses not to even mention what happens when the car breaks down unexpectedly, or some other unintended expense pops up. "Isn't that what credit cards are for?" NO! This is how we end up people making monthly payments on houses and cars and furniture and electronics and credit cards and on and on. "So what?" "Why do you care?" Let's just pretend for a minute like all the foreclosures going on around the country aren't affecting my house price, my job market and my investments. That mentality is wreaking havoc on my government.
We live in a country with a representative democracy which in our case is a great representation of the people behind it. Our government buys WAY more than it can afford. Way way way more. Last year alone we overspent by roughly $330 Billion (a third of a TRILLION dollars). We treat our national budget like our personal budgets, except for unfortunately we feel less burdened by the national debt plus we have avaricious politicians who are all too eager to help us spend our money on ourselves to cinch up their re-election efforts. This only exacerbates the problem causing us to dip even deeper into the hole.
Currently the US National Debt is $10,029,611,831,671 (That's just over 10 TRILLION Dollars). That boils down to $32,901 of debt per PERSON. If your kids have as much as mine do, I am looking at a debt of $230,307 for my household alone. And once you factor in the money we owe for all the programs we have obligated ourselves to but not saved for (i.e. Medicaid, social security, Medicare, etc.) that figure jumps to a little more than a half million Dollars per household. Do you have half a mill' lying around the house somewhere? "So what?" "Why do you care?" Well -
Question: Do you know what number is even bigger than the amount the government overspent last year?
Answer: The number of Dollars we paid towards INTEREST on the national debt.
Our debt makes it increasingly difficult to balance the budget from year to year. Sound familiar? So if we owed less ... we could spend more on those things we "deserve" like health care, poverty, job creation, etc. Heck we could plunk down more than half of the government's original bailout package without needing to ask China to "spot us" $700 Billion till next payday. Our Dollar wouldn't be falling through the floor. Heck ... maybe we could keep more of our hard earned money in our own pocket.
We are such a nation of overspenders that the Holy Grail of government finance is to balance the budget (that's only the yearly budget). Let's forget that no one (except for Bill Clinton during the high times of the 90's) has managed to do that for decades. But we don't even bring up (except for "crazy" Ross Perot in the '80s) the idea of paying off the national debt. We can't even stop the bleeding from year to year.
Our government is so ridiculous that while we are trying to figure out how to revive our economy, the senate couldn't help but tack on an EXTRA $100 Billion of pork (i.e. $100B of the spending has NOTHING to do with the bailout). Seriously? We are facing the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression and we can't keep from adding on spending amendments to the bailout package. Incredible.
In the presidential debates, you would have thought that Jim Lehrer was trying to pull teeth when trying to get the candidates to explain what parts of their budgets they were going to cut in order to account for the huge price tag of the bailout. Both candidates couldn't identify anything concrete the first time around. Then on the second pass one of the candidates had the audacity to hope that I wanted to hear what spending he wasn't going to cut AND then added that he would not abandon plans to expand the budget to include a health care plan for every American that no one on either side of the isle is very clear on how we will pay for it.
I am obviously beside myself with indignation over the American people's spending habits. I realize that you might not be able to cough up your half million right now, but we can be a little more reasonable in our personal spending as well as the type of spending that will earn our vote for our city council person, our senator and our president. If we don't make some serious changes to our own habits, then maybe, just maybe we can create a financial crisis that will finally beat the Great Depression once and for all.
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