Just Stuff by Gary Arrington

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Money. What a necessary evil that each of us must deal with. We don’t have enough and we spend too much. I have thought about it really hard, hard enough that my brain hurts, and I know absolutely no one that has too much money. I do know people that seem like they don’t want more money but then I think that they have just accepted their place in life.
Most, if not all, of the people that I know do a good job of balancing their budgets. They take their income and try really hard to balance it with their outgo. With that in mind, what the heck goes on with people who get elected to a public office.
I just watched a TV show that talked about an Alabama town that had to file for bankruptcy because they had spent all the money, was now broke and the city councils over the years had failed to correct the situation. It seems that people were willing to give up what the other guy received but “leave mine alone” was the mentality of the towns people.
The town cut off all retirement pay of past city workers and sent thousands back into the workforce. Unfortunately, they did not trim the pay of any current official. Those that are now cut off fought against any change in previous years. How sad but they have no one to blame but themselves.
How about the federal government? Do you realize that those elected people in Washington have not passed a budget for this country in more than two years? Two years, two whole years that this country has been living budgetless, how stupid is that. Yet none want to accept the blame. Show me a household that can live two years without some type of a budget, it cannot be done.
Now guess what the argument is? It is not the budget as a whole that they are worried about but do we extend our line of credit to cover the shortcomings or do we say enough is enough? Do we get a bigger credit card or do we rip all credit cards in our possession up and not use again? What a tough decision and the sad thing is, it didn’t need to come to this. Congress should have acted years ago but then Congress is Congress and they will do exactly as they please and not what is necessarily good for the country.
They want to raise the country’s debt level by $2.4 trillion, a debt that we citizens must repay sometime in the future. If you are wondering what that means for you, that will mean that each of us will owe $8,000 to whoever loans this country money. Eight thousand dollars each, if you are married that means $16,000 per couple and if you have a couple of kids that means $32,000 for your household. Easy come, easy go. This does not affect the normal federal taxes that each of us now pay already.
The sadder thing is, this $8,000 is on top of the money that each of us already owe for the federal debt, which is an additional $46,000 each, and $92,000 per couple. There is just one other sad note here, because we can’t seem to pay off this debt now, we each will owe thousands of dollars each year just to cover the interest on these loans. Feeling broke yet?
This is not really a political statement; it is more of a financial statement since it does involve every one of us. If we don’t start correcting this now, it will only get worse. We can’t stand pat, we can’t go forward on the same path that got us here and expect a different result. We must live within our means, if not then the best days are truly behind us.