I’m not an economist – but we have nearly twice the debt the nation had eight years ago, and that should be a matter of some concern. Gold had been stable a century back – $20.67 per ounce. Now it’s over $5,000. Silver’s up around $70 an ounce – when I was a kid in the sixties we lived in a silver dollar economy, where that silver dollar was an ounce.
So let’s figure out what that 39 billion dollar debt comes down to: $39,000,000,000,000 – a trillion has 12 zeroes. The US population is just under 350 million (including citizens and non-citizens. Really rough calculations let me take 7 zeroes off, and treat 35 and 39 as essentially the same. That leaves us looking at a one followed by five zeroes – the debt is somewhere on the close order of $100,000 for every man, woman and child living in our country. Kind of neat that the numbers work out for easy calculations – my calculator can’t handle such large numbers, but I was trained on a slide rule. Mr. Calvert would be pleased that I still recall the techniques he taught.
The problem is that it’s easy to spend other people’s money. Our congresscritters have quit completing budgets, and they aren’t as responsible with public funds as they are with their personal funds. Jon Tester would not have had a farm to return to if he had treated the farm budget like he treated the nation’s budget.
Somehow, I still have this old-fashioned idea that you should live within your means. And I am in favor of one more law – that if the national debt goes up, our congresscritters’ wages should go down. Thing is, they don’t pass a budget, they pass a continuing resolution. Maybe the Responsible Congresscritter law should reduce a congressional salary by 50 percent if they don’t pass a budget, then further reduce the salary by the same percentage as the debt increase. In reality, the solution requires a different sort of representative.
Not all governments are irresponsible – as Eureka schools hope for a bond, Fortine continues to use the part of their school that was built in 1909. It’s the difference between responsibility, and maintaining what was built at Fortine, and casually deferring maintenance in Eureka to the point that taxing to build a new school seems more effective than fixing the old one that the board failed to maintain. School district or federal government, it is very difficult to get people to be responsible when they’re spending other people’s money.
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