OPINION - EDITORIAL

We need to talk

There comes a time in everyone’s life …

Hey, buddy. Do ya mind if we siddown? How are things going at school? How's the gang doing? Cold enough for ya?

Okay, we'll get to the point. We think you have a problem. We found something the other day, and, well, your mother thought we should have a sit-down to discuss it.

No, we haven't been going through your things. This came in the mail. It's a bill. A credit card bill.

Fella, you've put almost $22 trillion on your credit card.

The folks who know about these things say that by next month, you will hit the $22 trillion mark. Twenty-two trillion. It's doubtful you can even fathom that kind of money.

We've been warning you about this debt for years. After 9/11 and a couple of wars and the Great Recession, you maxed out your cards at $10 trillion. Since the beginning of the Obama(care) years, you added another $11 trillion. The numbers keep creeping up, up, up. You keep applying for credit limit increases, and you've never been turned down.

It is very much our business. The bill keeps coming here.

You've more than doubled the national debt in only 10 years. Worse, you keep adding a trillion dollars, on average, every single year.

Don't start with how it's not as bad as a few years back. A few years back we were in a recession. These days, financial times are good. You should be paying down the debt, not increasing it. Sure, you might not rack up another trillion this year, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates you'll still be short another $981 billion by next fall.

Kid, you're going the wrong way. You're not making up any ground. You're still spending much more than you take in. Didn't they teach math, or maybe even finance, at your high school?

It looks as though deficits will continue to rise for the rest of the decade, if not longer. You call this a budget? We call it a recipe for disaster.

And look at the kinds of people you're hanging out with. What if this guy Bernie Sanders starts getting his way? The whole neighborhood is talking about him. Free tuition at community college? That'll be another $900 million on the credit card in two years' time. Some of the people you're listening to . . . Medicare for all? Elizabeth Warren's Second New Deal? Where do you meet these people?

More for the military. More for roads and bridges. More for job training. More for a wall. We're sure you need some of this stuff, but you're not cutting back anywhere else.

For example, look at this line. In October you took in $253 billion. But you spent $353 billion. That's a hundred billion in one month! Look, $84 billion on Social Security, in one month. Another $69 billion on defense, in one month. Another $53 billion on Medicare, in one month.

Oh, don't give us that stuff about finding savings in the budget by sniffing out waste. You say that every year.

Face it: You have a problem. And it's only going to get worse as the years go by. At some point, you're going to have to come up with a real budget, not a stop-gap, and it will have to be a budget that requires less spending than you're bring in. That's how the world works.

Maybe it's time to let adults set your budget.

After all, the bill is coming to this address.

Editorial on 12/16/2018

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