Too many of us are hearing but not listening

Imagine you can’t pay all your bills.

For the sake of simplicity, you owe $1000 this month but you only have $600. You will have to borrow $400 to make it through the month. Now imagine you have to do that every month for the next year. That’s $4800 you will need to borrow to pay your bills for the year. And you know that you’re going to have to borrow that same amount every month for the next year (and the foreseeable future.)

Now add the interest to that $400/month loan, that is if someone or some entity will loan you this money.  Interest at 13% (that’s a really good rate on your Visa card) adds $624/year to the balance or $52/month. So now you will owe $5424 for the year.

You know that you can’t pay your bills with the income you have now. You know that you can’t pay your bills without borrowing $4 for every $10 that you spend, or $40 for every $100 or $400 for every $1000. Or as in the case of the United States of America – .40 for every $1.00 that it spends.

What would you do?

You could start by calling  your banker or your credit card company and ask them to raise your borrowing limit.  Chances are real good they will laugh at you, before telling you no. And anyone with a high school education knows that raising your DEBT LIMIT will only dig your hole deeper in the long run.

So, you sit down at the kitchen table and prioritize. If you’re an average American, you start cutting out all the things you can do without so you can pay for the things that matter, like your mortgage and medicine and your personal yacht.

Then you put a lid or a cap on all your future spending.

No more dinners on Broadway or flying your favorite pizza chef in from Chicago.

No more Spanish vacations in your private jet. What? You don’t have a jet?

No more entertainment like those private Paul McCartney or Stevie Wonder concerts.

Next, you start looking around your house at the things you can live without and sell off. But remember, that’s only going to get you through a month or 2. Eventually, you’ll run out of things you can sell, unless you live in the White House and then there’s an unlimited amount of things of value to sell.

Maybe your Wall Street friends will throw fund raising parties for you. Oh please. Don’t tell me you have no Wall Street buds.

Publish a book with a well known terrorist ghost writing it for you? You don’t know any terrorists? Sucks to be you, then.

You don’t have a $10 million winery in California that you can sell? Oh, sorry. I’d mistaken you for Nancy Pelosi.

This isn’t our life. But we are shouldering the burden for these expenses and all the expenses that benefit everyone else, including and most irritating – the political class.

Most of  us would fore go our social security checks for a couple more years. Most of us would be willing to work a couple more years rather than dump these bills on our children and grandchildren. Most of us are willing to do with less or do without to balance our books and not leave unheard of debt for our kids.

And most of us would like to see the ruling class suffering just a little bit with us.