- a gift of debt

On this Eve of Christmas, I thought I would take a moment to point out the gift of debt that our federal government has blessed us with (I hope you sense my sarcasm).   More importantly they have saddled my children, my unborn grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with debt that will probably never be paid back.

As if it were not bad enough, congress recently voted to increase our Debt Ceiling to $12.4 trillion.  Most of us are disgusted by hearing that, but we have no real concept of how much money it really is.  To give you a better idea what 12 trillion dollars is:

$12,400,000,000,000  that is what it looks like... It has way too many zeroes. 

We are paying more than ONE BILLION DOLLARS in interest every day.

A $1 bill is approximately 6.125 inches long....  So if you laid $12.4 trillion on the ground, end to end it would stretch more than 1 billion miles long (1,198,705,808) or more than 48 thousand times around the earth or to the sun and back more than 6 times.

I also read this morning that California is $21 billion in debt and that "there are no easy solutions left".  I have an easy solution; STOP SPENDING MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE!!!!!  I know it is a wild idea, but one that most families and business owners understand.  Maybe we need to elect businessmen and family men rather than actors and lawyers.  As a nation (regardless of political party) we continue to elect the most unintelligent people on earth and I simply don't understand why.  I wonder what it is going to take for us to wake up and realize that we need to do something very different.  We need to elect "average guys" to run things.  As long as we continue to elect the same fools, we will continue to run down the path of ruin.