Budget Craziness

This just in: The Treasury Department said Wednesday it expects to hit the government's debt ceiling by the end of February, putting pressure on Congress to raise the limit from its current level of $12.4 trillion. How much is that divided by the population of the country. Let’s see – a trillion is a 1 with 12 zeros after it. According to a census website the population of the US today is 308,616,606. So we can do the math of the debt divided by the population and get the per person total: $40179 for every man, woman and child in the country. WTF!!! Yikes! This is crazy! And even crazier is that no doubt congress will raise this ceiling so we soon will owe even more. In our bizarre political system – the largest part of the spending – so called “defense” spending – that includes thousand dollars a day contractors in war zones we have created, and pricy equipment only suitable for WW II type warfare - is not part of the spending freeze that the President is recommending. The new budget of $3.8 trillion in the current budget year assumes that we will borrow 40 cents for every dollar spent! Who thinks this will end well? At least House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that if we are looking for savings, military spending should be on the table with the rest of the budget. Since the US total military budget nearly equals what the whole wide rest of the world spends on its militaries in total — this spending should not only be on the chopping block, it should head the chopping block list. And we should look at a way to use diplomacy to deal with our enemies. The current strategy, while it is certainly enriching the military industrial complex, is bound to also be creating as many enemies as it destroys.