Show Me The Money

OK, let’s take a minute here to put things into perspective.  Take a dollar bill and stack it onto another one.  Paper thin.  Not much height to that.  Well, keep stacking those paper thin bills on top of each other, and do it until you have 16,699 trillion of them stacked up.  You could stack them to the moon more than four times doing that.  That represents the current debt of the federal government.  That does take into account any borrowing by individual states or local governments…and it doesn’t even start to consider the $11.13 trillion in personal debt that Americans carry as individuals and families.

So, yesterday congress finally came to an agreement about this problem…and once again raised our debt limit so we can borrow even more money.  The “evil republicans” who want to reduce our spending have once again been put in their place.

Plato said democracies can’t work because voters will always vote for their self interests rather than the common good.  John F. Kennedy was famously quoted - ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.  And still, twenty years later we became a “debtor country” due to our ever-increasing need to consider our materialism and personal self-interest over the common good.

Paul made a good comment in the New Testament letter to Timothy that love of money is the root of all kinds of evils.  Material cravings inevitably lead us astray from our faith and from good government practices.  Proverbs warn that “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”  On the world stage, that is the last place we need to be right now!