If you are anything like me, there are some words and ideas that cause immediate glaze and trance: hermeneutics, tax code, parliamentary procedure, Thomas Aquinas, and Patrick White, for example.
But the greatest of these doze-inducers are the magic words The National Debt. I have seen people at a dinner table plop their faces into their pastas when these words are uttered; I have seen savage dogs instantly rendered insensate; I have whispered brawling children to sleep by briefly examining the national debt and its implications.
Yet this morning I inflict the words debt and deficit upon you, because even I, a simpleton in economic and financial matters, have begun to be quietly terrified and angry about my country's financial status, and not for political reasons as much as parental.
Of late I begin to think my country is stealing nakedly from its children, beggaring its grandchildren, and essentially selling what was one of the greatest national ideas in human history to China.
An unnerving state of affairs.
Here are some handles on it. The United States' national debt — the money we owe — is $14 trillion, the biggest outstanding bill in American history. Our biggest creditor is China. My personal share of that debt, were we to pawn it off on each citizen of any age and stage, is $46,000, far more than half my annual income. The budget deficit — the hole between income and outgo — is $1.5 trillion.
The proposal being debated in my national capitol, the one that probably will pass into law, will allow us to borrow more money, so that our deficit will creep past $1.5 trillion, even as we raise a few taxes, cut an enormous number of public services, hope desperately for a business boom, and blame each other for the mess in ever more vituperative terms.
It's a crazy number, 1.5 trillion — 1,500,000,000,000; pinball numbers, as we say in the States. And how very easy it is to ignore the matter, hope it will all work out, trust our elected representatives to right the ship, entertain the idea of learning Chinese, and trundle along trying to manage the smaller unwieldy corporation that is the family unit, with its two minor incomes, vast mortgage, and economically useless teenagers, not to mention the dog, who has never earned a penny as yet.
But I cannot do that, because the cold logic of it all is clear to me.