So, I'm no expert on federal spending. I don't pretend to be. But my parents raised me to budget, and I know the basic principle of budgeting: don't spend money you don't have.
Now there are certain exceptions, like mortgages and cars (though on that latter one my goal is to minimize or avoid car debt, and on the house you get into it responsibly). But for the most part, I stay out of debt by not spending money I don't have. And that includes planning ahead a bit, saving up for the monthly bills.
There are times when I wish I could just go out to Olive Garden with Dan, or buy that cute blouse I saw in a store window, but I have to say no to those things. Because a meal at Olive Garden would mean we can't afford groceries for 5 or 6 days. There are times when people try to convince me I need cable and all sorts of other things. But I have to prioritize. If I have x amount of money coming in, I need to cover the essentials and then I can decide what to do with the excess. And cable is not an essential.
So I am baffled to hear about the trillions and trillions of dollars of debt our country has accumulated. It just seems so irresponsible to me. Like I said, I'm no expert on where all this money is going. But I imagine there are research projects that are great, but could wait. And inflated salaries that could be trimmed. And I know there've been bailouts that seem a bit excessive, to say the least.
I know that not everyone agrees about what's important. But congress or whoever just needs to sit down and say, "OK...this is how much we have coming in annually. This much is how much we need to set aside each year so we can pay off our $15 trillion dollar debt in a reasonable amount of time. This is how much we have leftover. These are the things we're going to put it towards. Everything else will have to wait until we've paid off our debt."
I know I'm not in the thick of it. But it seems like it would just be a much-bigger-scale version of what I do in managing a household budget. So just fix it, people!
Monday, September 12, 2011
Debt
Posted by Ali Thompson at 9:20 PM
Labels: budgeting, federal spending, fiscal responsibility, national debt
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1 comments:
It is NOT just a bigger scale version of a personal budget. There can be good reasons for governments to have debt. And unlike you, the government has a much bigger say in HOW MUCH INCOME it has to spend in the first place. Yet due to a small handful of rich people who are the puppetmasters of government, the federal government has NOT been collecting what it easily could. Republicans used to be a party that believed in fiscal responsibility, but in the last few decades have transformed from caring about balanced budget to ONLY caring about cutting taxes - on the rich. They therefore were fine with, for instance, starting two expensive wars but NOT increasing revenue in order to pay for them. And their paranoia over socialized medicine prevented Obama's health care bill from containing a public option, which was a very necessary component for controlling the costs of health care, which continue to spiral. The Dems are unfortunately funded by the same puppetmasters, though not to the same extent. Rather than actively doing their bidding, for the most part, they just don't actively resist. Most of our problems have to do with making a few very wealthy people wealthier and wealthier, at the expense of pretty much everyone and everything else.
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