Should US Citizens Demand Financial Responsibility from the Government?
As a US Citizen, who is trying to be financially responsible, I am disheartened by the blatant abuse of debt that the federal government has displayed. If you look at the current total federal debt you will see that the United States, at the time of this writing is in debt by over nine trillion dollars (which is their conservative estimate). This debt has not been so severe historically and reflects the general attitude of the three branches of the United States Government. They have had a paradigm shift as has been reflected by their constituents in some regards.
I would love to see the government try to operate on a genuine, limited by the amount of income, budget. According to the latest information I could find (from 2005) the government received around $934,703,000,000.00 in taxes from US citizens [this does not include other debts that were paid to the US from other countries and returns on any federal investments]. That number should indicate a budget of around nine hundred billion dollars. If the federal government were to spend one tenth of that (ninety billion dollars) to pay off debt and stopped accruing more debt it would take it one hundred years to pay off that debt! That’s a long time, but its possible that they could pay off the debt with some major trimming.
This site is not about political activism, its about financial management, and so I don’t want to go into politics on a specific level. However, I do think that the federal government and the state governments need to get their act together or the problem of debt will effect the US economy severely - worse than its current dollar value decline. I don’t have an answer as to where ninety billion dollars can be trimmed out of the budget (plus the $536,550,000,000.00 a year of excess debt they’re accruing) but I think it is reasonable for the United States citizen to communicate with their congressmen to get things changed.
Of course if I were to try to live like the US government I would accrue $147.00 a day in new debt. Or to put that into perspective $53,655.00 a year. And if I live for another 40 years operating like that I would have over 783 million dollars in debt. I bet I would have the sweetest hummer, though. Oh, and a great sized house. And I would have every iPod ever made. And a recording studio. And interest payments like you wouldn’t believe! I would have to pay 3.62 million dollars a month in interest [assuming a federally available 5% interest rate]. Sweet googly-moogly that’s just insane!
Be financially responsible, tell your government they should be responsible, and for goodness sake don’t run with scissors!
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