I’m going to come right out and just admit that I don’t really understand this whole “debt ceiling” thing.
Maybe it’s that I don’t understand how government debts even work in the world, but I guess it confuses me how we’re allowed to just vote and raise our own debt limit. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if the creditors that are giving us that money in the first place were the ones to make the decision??? I mean, I can’t just call up Chase tonight and say, “Hey, guys – my wife and I were talking and because we really want to buy a new boat, we’re going to need to increase our spending limit. We’ll take another $5,000 – thanks!”
Of course, the other side of the discussion is simply how ridiculous it all is in the first place … and a little bit scary for generations to come, frankly. To continue the personal finance comparison, you can’t pay off debts without making sacrifices, and seeing as the entire focus of basically everything is always about reduced spending (that rarely ever happens) along with reducing taxes, it’s silly to think that we could ever possibly make progress on a $15 trillion debt like that. Honestly, I don’t really have a problem paying my taxes, even though I might grumble a bit when I’m writing the check each year, but likewise I understand that services cost money and I think one role of the government is to sustain public services for the greater good like police and fire and libraries and schools and museums. I know a lot of people don’t share my view on the first part – they don’t want to pay taxes and because they don’t personally use museums, for example, themselves, then only those who use them should pay for them…
And if you want to get stupid about the argument, I personally don’t believe in the wars that we’re in right now, so why not just let the people who believe in those pay the $200 billion a year that they’re costing us and my tax dollars can go towards something useful, like roads and schools and a space program. The idea that one year of war costs us the equivalent of the entire 30-year run of the space shuttle program ($196 billion) to me is but one sign that war is just a pit that we’re dumping money down that clearly we don’t even have to begin with.
But we can’t cut spending on the wars because … terrorism.
So I guess our options are…
- Give up on the idea of paying off our debts, eventually watch our economy collapse as the US dollar is deemed basically worthless.
- Continue to cut worthwhile programs focusing on education and local public safety and research towards the future because war is too profitable to quit.
- Lower taxes for corporations in hopes that they’ll create new jobs, even though they won’t.
Seriously, is there even a way that we can get out of this at this point? Right now when I look over our options and the direction that our politicians are taking us, it seems like the only sacrifice that they’re willing to make is that of future generations. Sucks to be our children’s children, I guess…