Here is the reason that the Democrats were unable to make the enormous federal budget deficits into a campaign issue last year: to the average American, the numbers are wholly incomprehensible. Who can really get their hands around exactly what a billion dollars is or what it can do? Who can readily fathom the difference between $1 billion and $500 billion or $1 trillion? Can the average person be expected to know how many additional free school lunches could be offered to low-income children with $1.3 billion instead of $1.2 billion? Or how many more loans could be made to cities for wastewater pollution reduction with $5.7 billion instead of $5.4 billion? I mean, hell, I spent a decade doing public finance for a living, and I can't really fathom the magnitude of those numbers.
So how do you make the deficit number easier to understand? Simple. Put it into context: beside total revenues. The $427 billion deficit projected by the White House for this year? A difficult concept on its own. But put that next to the $1.8 trillion in projected receipts (taxes, etc.) and it starts to get easier. That's a deficit equal to 24% of revenues.
Now boil it down to a more personal level. That's the same as if a person or family making $35,000 a year were borrowing another $8,000+ on their credit cards every year. Or a family making $100,000 were borrowing $24,000 every year. Every year. How long do you think your family would stay solvent? How long before you're eating beanie weenie and white bread every night and your phone's ringing off the hook with creditors on the line and you're losing your house and you can't afford to take your kid to the doctor and you realize you're never going to dig yourself out of this hole? But, of course, the President and the Congress don't have to eat beanie weenie . . . we do.
Despite what we might like to believe, Washington is loaded with brilliant minds. Can't somebody there find a way to explain to America what a problem this is?
9 comments:
I read somewhere that every American baby is born owing $26,000 as its share of the national debt.
Or take the new projected deficit of $427 billion. Divide by latest estimate of US population: 293,000,000. That comes to $1457 per person, just for this year's government overspending.
And what about the fact that the single biggest item in the budget -- bigger than the military budget -- is interest payments on the loans the government has taken out? Reagan tripled the debt, right? Be conservative: say $4 trillion of the debt is due to nothing else but interest on debt payments, payable to the wealthy, because of tax cuts, targeted at the wealthy. That's roughly $14,000 you owe, I owe, my child will owe, to wealthy lenders as interest on the money they loan the government to finance their own tax cuts.
In a real country, this would bring revolution. Here, it brings "Who's Your Daddy?"
I read somewhere that every American baby is born owing $26,000 as its share of the national debt.
Or take the new projected deficit of $427 billion. Divide by latest estimate of US population: 293,000,000. That comes to $1457 per person, just for this year's government overspending.
And what about the fact that the single biggest item in the budget -- bigger than the military budget -- is interest payments on the loans the government has taken out? Reagan tripled the debt, right? Be conservative: say $2 trillion of the debt is due to nothing else but interest on debt payments, payable to the wealthy, because of tax cuts, targeted at the wealthy. That's roughly $7,000 you owe, I owe, my child will owe, to wealthy lenders as interest on the money they loan the government to finance their own tax cuts.
In a real country, this would bring revolution. Here, it brings "Who's Your Daddy?"
I have no idea why that posted 3 times -- my apologies.
It was because I hit Stop and trimmed my estimate in the second post.
Anybody figured out how to delete comments? The Blogger Help is bullshit on this topic. El Gordo, you did it once I remember.
But wait... isn't our debt largely financed by foreign purchases of treasury bills? So, in a way, Saudi Arabia and Japan and China are loaning us the money to buy their oil, cars, and Wal-Mart products?
Why you choose to disparage Beanie Weenies, I have no idea.
It's because Our Beloved Leader is trying to deliberately bankrupt the government, so all the programs have to be cut.
The total debt is some 7.6 trillion, or roughly 4X annual receipts. Taking your family earning $100,000 a year, adding $24,000 to a credit card every year -- they already have $400,000 on the credit card.
Grover Norquist wants to bankrupt the government....G.W.Bush wants to have it all, or just enough so he and his friends can cash out.
I have always thought that a nice analogy to credit-card debt - which the average American definitely understands - would go a long way toward explaining why these big, abstract numbers actually matter.
Today, while listening to the Prez himself hold a press conference, during which he was asked about Social Security privatization, it occurred to me that I would LOVE to hear him explain exactly how his so-called "reform" would result in savings down the road, or why it is that we should believe that deficits don't matter. He doesn't even have the most fundamental grasp of basic economic principles - it would be hilarious if it weren't so...er...real.
Incidentally, have y'all been following the whole nomenclature issue on www.talkingpointsmemo.com? They've been tracking how the Bush administration is now trying to force the press to say "personal accounts" instead of "private accounts," even though the latter was the administration's preferred term as recently as mid-January.
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