The Ten Trillion Dollar Crisis

In one of the great movies of the last century, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise gave us a glimpse of the state of mind of the military in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tour de force is called "A Few Good Men". I mention this movie only to repeat one of the greatest lines in the movie, shouted by Jack Nicholson's character as he was backed into a corner on the witness stand. He shouted, and I quote, "You can't handle the truth!", referring to the American public. And in another award winner, Bart Simpsons' writers noted, "It takes two to lie. One to do the lying and the other to do the listening". Unfortunately, these two statements are spelling doom for the economic state of our nation. The American public is doing the listening, and the leaders of our nation are doing the misleading. If we don't know the truth, we certainly can't be expected to handle it.

American's government debt has crossed the 9 trillion dollar mark this year. This roughly equates to 30,000 dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country. If you are a family of 5, your family's share of this debt is 150,000 dollars. Are you feeling a little poorer? Neither is anyone else, and that is a huge portion of our problem. In 31 of the last 35 years the government has operated in the red. For some reason, we all feel that the government's lack of financial responsibility has nothing to do with us individually. Just wait until our social security and medicare programs are cut back drastically and I guarantee you will feel the effects of ridiculous financial policies.

This year GW Bush proposes pushing the deficit up by an additional 400 billion dollars. The budget he proposes is over 3 trillion dollars and the deficit he proposes does not include the cost of the of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor does it accurately reflect the loss of revenue which is certainly forthcoming from a rapidly faltering economy. These items alone could easily add another 200 billion dollars to the deficit. Before we see another balanced budget we will go over the 10 trillion dollar mark. If GW has his way, we will cross the 10 trillion dollar deficit level in another two years. Further, we get these figures from the office of underestimators. We have taken a flight from reason in this country. When our president can propose adding 400 billion to a 9 trillion dollar deficit, and in the same sentence call this a "good" budget, he has joined Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter is at the helm! The public must be held partly responsible for the cataclysmic state of the nation's economic affairs. The president can only propose a budget; the Congress must approve it, and between these two branches of government it is hard to say who wears the bigger dunce cap. But we elect them all.

Remember the crisis the government faced as we approached the end of the last century. Some predicted the end of the world as we know it, because the computers which run everything didn't have the year 2000 available to them. Well guess what? We are there again. Government computers don't have enough room for 10 trillion dollars of red ink. That requires room for 14 digits. No one ever expected us to need more than 13 digits of room in the dollar column to run the government. The plus side to the equation is that the thousands of pages of line items will be compressed to just a few pages. That's right. The entire projected revenue of the United States government will barely cover just three line items; social security, medicare, and interest on the national debt. By 2040 there will be no money for any other government programs or expenses.

As the largest group of voters this nation has ever seen, the baby boomers must accept a large portion of responsibility for this travesty. If we continue to elect, through ignorance (by this I don't mean stupid...we are not stupid, just uninformed) or apathy, a group of people who put their own agendas above those of the nation, we will have in the not-too-distant future a dollar worth less than a peso.

Here is an example of what I mean by an ignorant electorate. On Bill Moyer's Journal, a brilliant author, Susan Jacoby, astounded me, and I hope everyone in this country, with the following results from a recent Roper poll about geography. Young people between the ages of 18 and 25 were shown a map of the world and asked to locate four countries; Iraq, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. This map, by the way, had the initials of every country printed within each country. Only 23% of college graduates and 6% of high school graduates were able to correctly identify these countries. This area of the world is one of the most explosive on the planet, and is consuming a tremendous amount of our nation's resources. The real shameful part of this poll is that these graduates didn't even know where the Middle East is in the world, or presumably they would have been able to identify the countries by their initials.

It is hard to suggest a course of action to correct these crippling problems. While YouTube, Facebook, Myspace and the latest video games consume our youths' time and attention, a monster of biblical proportions is building strength just outside the monitor screen. Our country is only a small portion of the world population. Even as we protect our shores from a military invasion, the financial invasion of our country continues unabated. The economic overthrow of our way of life is just around the corner. Hopefully our children and voters will see this threat in time and elect officials up to the challenge. "The good people in this country are at their best when things are at their worst" is another great movie line by Jeff Bridges in the movie Starman. I hope the writers were correct.

Plus/Minus of an early campaign

On the surface it sounds like a big win for the country. Voters have nearly a year’s head start learning about the candidates’ backgrounds and politics. As Jay Leno's jaywalk series plainly shows, most people of voting age don't even recognize the faces of the candidates, let alone have knowledge of any particular candidate's position on major issues.
When thousands of lives and billions (trillions) of dollars are being sacrificed to a war which may extend over several generations, we owe our undivided attention to the policies and promises of a future president.

From the perspective of the baby boomers, I relish the switch to politics from the mind numbing and never ending exposés about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Since we are putting the nation's future in hock past their eyeballs, we at least owe those future generations the courtesy of knowing why. However, it may only be wishful thinking to suppose the public will stay tuned to these most important of concerns. In all likelihood they will simply change the channel. As Jay Leno again says, “We get the government we deserve.".

One huge minus to an early campaign involves the early elimination of candidates whose campaigns couldn't raise enough money to gain parity in the Caucasus. Well-financed candidates were able to gain early momentum while late bloomers like Ron Paul got sacrificed on the altar of grassroots. It looks as though special-interest groups will trump the mamas and papas every time. Five dollars here and ten dollars there don’t amount to much when parking fees alone can amount to $500,000 in the year before the primary. The fact that Hillary Clinton had to "lend her campaign" $5 million at this stage in the process just to "hang in there” with Senator Obama shows how big a role early money plays in today's political climate.

Only time will tell whether the nation's affairs will hold sway over our celebrities’ affairs. We can't, after all, expect a nation whose rocket scientists aren't smarter than a fifth grader to pay serious attention to a two-year discussion of election politics. One thing that should be clear after such lengthy debate, however, is that we should have forced the candidates to have clearly expressed their opinions and positions. Their party’s platform should also be abundantly clear.

Whether we can keep a President accountable for his promises is another issue entirely. We have seen the powers of the presidency expanded to the point where it is fair to say Congress is now irrelevant. The fact that a democratically controlled Congress is now merely a rubber stamp to a Republican president is unprecedented. The fact that war crimes and blatant civil rights violations occur without redress by the President and his men doesn't bode well for our country's future. In a recent commentary by Keith Obermann he notes that our vice president needs to be careful what countries he visits after office, lest he be hanged for war crimes. It sickens me to witness our country's leaders compared to Hitler's henchmen. However, if we citizens allow our leaders to invade sovereign nations without provocation, we deserve the comparison. Lord help us if we continue to allow our leaders to help themselves to the nation’s wealth from positions above the law.