$20,555,552,622,666

We (you, me, our neighbors and our children) owe well over $20 Trillion dollars.  Now that is a number that is difficult to deal with.  Let’s try an analogy.  A million seconds is 12 days ago.  Where were you 12 days ago?  What were you doing?  A billion seconds ago was 31 years!  How old were you a billion seconds ago?  But a trillion seconds was 31,688 years ago.  That long ago was the time of Neanderthals.  Yet our national debt (the amount YOU owe) is not $1 trillion but $20 trillion!

            Of course, we are not talking about seconds, but money.  If you have $10,000 in nice, new $100 bills it can be carried in one’s pocket, and even $1 million of the same can be put in a grocery sack, tossed in your back pack and carried wherever you go.  But $1 billion turns into a pallet of money at least 3 feet tall and a trillion covers acres of double stacked pallets.  Such numbers are almost beyond comprehension and thus tend to diminish in importance.

            American has seen its debt, as a share of the national economy, higher, but only for a few years around World War II.  Nor is debt necessarily a bad thing.  When you go into debt to buy a house, a better car, higher education or a needed appliance you are measuring the cost of the debt (monetary interest and the moral and legal obligation to pay) against the good that debt will provide (safety, investment opportunity, transportation to a job, quality of life).  You also assume that the debt can and will be repaid in a realistic time frame.  That time frame is what balances the debt itself.  The intelligent among you already grasp my point.

            Our metastasizing national debt is primarily due to entitlement costs and an aging population.  Entitlements simply mean that if you fit the definition of the program you are “entitled” to the benefit.  There is no further vetting required.  Likewise, you can’t be excluded via some test or condition.  The entitlements of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHP, and other subsidies now make up 48% of the yearly Federal spending.  [Compare that to our next biggest bite of the apple, Defense, which makes up 15%.]

            Entitlements are the third rail of politics.  They are the programs no one can touch without self-serving hysteria on the other side.  No one wants them cut, but no one wants to tackle how to pay for them.  The only acceptable mantra seems to be “tax the rich.”  Yet, no one defines the term “rich.”  While mining the ever-rich ore of class warfare one must never say whom the rich are.  That might alienate a constituency.   Besides, the electorate is more than happy to assume that the “rich” are anyone earning more than they and, ergo, they certainly are not part of the taxable group.  These same people are about to be seduced and abandoned by the current crop of Presidential nominees.  There, you have been warned.

            We can ignore this debt and simply assume that everything will work out on it own, or we can try fixing it.  We can accept the reality that tax revenue must be increased, and spending must be decreased, or we can pretend that we will never run out of resources.  We can make the hard choices or have the equally hard consequences visited upon us by a stern reality. 

            Contemplate the future and keep the faith.