opinion

RABBLE ROUSER: Under Obama, debt has reached $18 trillion

America passed a major milestone last month. Unfortunately, with the media focused on overzealous cops, violent protests and senior Cabinet position firings, that milestone slipped by rather quietly.

We’re a society that loves to celebrate our firsts and our biggest, right? Heck, there’s a book out there that regularly publishes that sort of thing.

So imagine my surprise when even “The Guinness Book of World Records” missed the fact that the U.S. national debt had surpassed $18 trillion in December (setting a world record, by the way), surpassing Rome’s debt before it burned, while Nero fiddled, in current U.S. dollars.

Eighteen trillion dollars! For those of you struggling to make ends meet under Obamanomics, let me put this in perspective. One trillion one dollar bills, stacked carefully on top of each other, would reach a height of 68,000 miles. That’s a quarter of the way to the moon. Now multiply that times 18. Yea, that’s where we’re at.

How’d it get so bad? It’s simple. The Democratically controlled Senate hasn’t passed a budget since 2006. Our government agencies are being funded piecemeal with no bottom line in sight. It’s no coincidence that our national debt started to snowball right about the same time this hackneyed approach to budgeting started.

In 2008, Candidate Obama said that raising the national debt was not only unpatriotic but also hurtful to our children. I couldn’t agree more but, unfortunately, this guy doesn’t always do what he says.

And when you crunch the numbers, our president looks more like Benedict Arnold with a credit card-purchased butt-beating switch in hand, than our nation and children’s financial advocate.

Under President Barack Obama, our national debt has tripled. And that’s not the scariest part. The amount of our debt held by our Federal Reserve has increased threefold also. This means that we have borrowed over $2.5 trillion from ourselves in the last six years. Bernie Madoff couldn’t have come up with a better Ponzi scheme. I doubt any lender you and I go to would afford us that deal.

And there’s the rub. We live in a two-tier society. Government, and the rest of us.

All you have to do is look at the benefits these folks enjoy to see the truth of it. Free cars, haircuts and meals, with free, zero deductible health care seems pretty cushy to me. They couldn’t relate to us even if they were related to us.

But I have do a solution. Dear Congress, stop spending more money than you take in! Pretty simple economics, eh? Maybe we should elect more economists and mathematicians to Congress than lawyers. At least they can add.

The fact of the matter is this: If we don’t address this increasing monetary yoke around our necks, the United States of America will burn financially, just as Rome did literally.

I only hope my free Obama-Fiddle gets here in time. I hear Nero’s giving lessons.

The writer lives in Mount Ephraim.