Now that the election is over...

let's talk about some important, very important numbers that will impact our combined futures.  But first an illustration, because government tosses numbers like million, billion and trillion around without any context.

There was a very wealthy man who was tired of his wife asking for money every day.  So he gave her $1 million and told her "spend only $10,000 a day and don't ask for any more money until this money is all used up.  Roughly 2.7 years later, she was back asking for more money.  This time he gave her $1 billion and the same instructions, knowing she wouldn't be back asking for more money for 2,739 years.  Had he given her $1 trillion, she wouldn't have been back for 2,739,276 years.

Congress will have to get together in the lame duck period of this session and pass a bill to increase the nation's debt ceiling, currently set at $16.4 trillion dollars.  To put that number into better perspective, there are almost 315 million people in the U.S. at present.  That means that there is more than $52,000 in national debt for every man, woman and child in our nation when we hit that ceiling very soon.  We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year in interest to finance that debt without making any progress in paying ANY of it off.  At the current rate of growth, by the time President Obama's second term is over, the national debt will be more than $20 trillion.

Worse yet, the only move toward any concept of fiscal responsibility, the so-called "fiscal cliff" doesn't have a prayer of being implemented on January 1st.  President Obama has already promised defense contractors that their employees are safe from projected layoffs that would have been caused by the projected cuts in the sequestration process.

We can't go on like this.  To those who say "just tax the rich more", that's not a real answer.  Those who earn more than $100,000 annually are already paying 70% of all income tax collected.  Even if we were to start taxing the highest earners at a rate of 100% of their income, it wouldn't balance the budget.

I don't pretend to have any easy answers.  You can make some progress in reducing the deficit by means-testing Social Security benefits and Medicare benefits for retirees with larger incomes.  You can make some progress by eliminating fraud in the Medicare and Welfare programs.  You can make some progress by austerity in government programs and operations.  But most cuts in government programs involves putting more people into the already crowded unemployment lines.  What makes the problem worse is the unfunded liabilities of the state, county and city governments across the land.  But that's a subject for another rant.

If you spent more money than you were bringing in, eventually you would run out of credit.  Unlike you, the government can just keep printing money, but doing too much of that makes that money worthless.  Our ability to finance our debt is not infinite.  Somehow, somewhere, the equation of expenses > revenue must be balanced and changed to expenses < revenue.  Elsewise the future for us and future generations is very, very bleak.

One last thing.  As I predicted, President Obama won reelection in the Electoral College.  But he appears to have lost the popular vote.  That's indicative that he does NOT have a mandate from the American people to continue on the course he has led the nation for the last four years.  Add in the fact that the other party maintained control of the House and you have a clear message from a large group of people.  They aren't happy.  They chose the lesser of two evils. 

The President and the Republicans in Congress need to work together to resolve the problem of our growing debt and inability to spend an amount less than or equal to the revenues generated.  Hopefully they will recognize this.