I've been thinking recently about the national debt—about the deficit, and the way we deal with it as a nation.
I don't know what conservative politicians (a group who have very little in common with the average conservative citizen) were saying in the forties and fifties, but by the time I became politically conscious, they constantly repeated one theme.
The idea was that the average American family had to balance its budget, and so it was reasonable to expect the same from the American government—the government should not be going into debt.
Even as a teenager, I had trouble with their reasoning.
I didn't actually know any families who had no debt.
As noble as the idea of a debt-free household might be, it was certainly not a possibility in my neighborhood, unless you used the word household in a way which excluded an actual house.
My parents had debt. My friends' parents had debt. That was how you financed a decent lifestyle.
Some people paid it off by the time they were old, some didn't.
So, I rejected the politician's conclusion about the government.
But I don't reject the analogy.
In fact, I think it's a rather good one—it just doesn't lead where they want us to go.
Think about it seriously for a second.
As any family knows, you don't pay off your mortgage and your credit cards by going to your boss and asking for a pay cut.
You don't get rid of a deficit by refusing to invest in training for a better job.
You don't do it by refusing to take care of the infrastructure in your own home (so that instead of that simple roof repair you end up having to replace water-damaged walls).
You don't balance your budget by refusing to go to the doctor until you are seriously ill.
You do it by cutting back on the non-essentials, making the important investments, and increasing your income so you can make those payments or even put a little extra on the principal.
If we follow the analogy those politicians handed us, but put a little more thought into what they mean, it boils down to a sort of family values—a matter of applying the same sort of values and common sense to our homeland as we do to our homes.
If healthcare costs threaten to bankrupt us, we should invest in more preventitive measures, make sure people are covered so they can go to the doctor earlier rather than later, and do what we can to eliminate waste in the system.
If our infrastructure is out of date or falling apart, we should fix it sooner rather than later—to avoid higher repair costs, but also to make the homeland a more productive and pleasant place to live.
If our workforce needs training, we should make that possible, because a well trained workforce will make our entire national family more prosperous.
And if we need more money to do these things, we should do what any self-respecting parent would do in order to provide the necessities for their own home and family: find a way to bring in more money.
Then we should use that money both to finance the well-being of our homeland, but also to pay down the principal on our debt.
It's really a no-brainer, something every family tries to do all the time.
I wonder why those politicians can't figure it out.
