Vice President Biden: “To avoid hitting bottom, keep digging.”
Okay, he didn’t say it in quite those words, but the words he did use were very close. Here’s what I mean:
Granted, I’m not some financial guru or a mathematical prodigy, but I like to think that I have a modicum of common sense as well as a sense of recent history. This year’s federal budget has a deficit of more than $1,000,000,000,000. Yes, that number has 12 zeroes at the end. I used the long form of the number so that one can grasp the enormity of this number.
To put it bluntly, there’s no money left in the bank. In fact, the bank account is more than a trillion dollars in the hole. Yet, the esteemed vice president is advocating taking even more money out of that bank (and going deeper into that hole) to stave off bankruptcy. This type of behavior is what causes bankruptcy, not what prevents it.
Even as Vice President Biden was extolling the virtues of idiocy, Douglas W. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office was testifying before the Senate Budget Committee. His testimony was that “the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run.”
If we follow Vice President Biden’s economic advice, then the federal deficit will explode even more than it already has. What was once called “unsustainable” will give way to imminent financial collapse.
To drive my point home, I’m going to ask a couple of questions:
If you ran a business with the same financial model as the federal government, how long would you expect to remain in business?
If you ran your personal finances with the same financial model as the federal government, how long could you sustain your current lifestyle?
Think about your answer, and then ask yourself why the federal government would be any different.
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