Ba-Roke Obama

For a smart guy, President Obama sure seems to be having trouble understanding that we are broke. 

Granted, it is difficult to comprehend our fiscal situation with billions and trillions being thrown around – numbers no person can comprehend.  However, if we drop 8 zeros off all those big numbers, divide them all by 100 million, we can describe the federal budget in terms that every family can understand.

Drop the 8 zeros, and it goes like this: we make $27,000 a year, and we spend $42,000.  Let’s stop right there. 99.9% of us – those who don’t have a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard – can see exactly what the problem is: we are spending 55% more than we have.   

We have been living stupid for quite a few years now, so we already owe $120,000 on our Visa card.  Stop again for a second.  99.9% of us – those who don’t run the Federal Reserve – know that you can’t carry debt that is 4 times your annual income.

This year we will borrow another $18,000 to pay ongoing government expenses, including interest on the outstanding balance. 95% of us – those who didn’t take out a sub-prime loan at a place in a strip mall next to the Check ‘N’ Go – know that you have to pay back a loan.  

And we spent the money we borrowed on some pretty dumb things.  We borrowed $7,800 last winter for a stimulus bill that didn’t stimulate anything.  It was supposed to add 3 million new jobs; we lost 3 million.  Now we had to borrow another $300 to pay for the extra unemployment benefits.

We borrowed $8,500 to give to some big banks last fall; now they want to give us $2,000 back and call it square. 

We borrowed $500 to buy into GM and Chrysler then borrowed another $40 to give people to buy our cars. They took the money and bought Hondas instead; that really sucked.  $1,200 for Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t enough, so we borrowed $300 to send more troops.

The Senate is busy trying to spend another $8,500 we don’t have on health care; the House already passed a version that would cost $12,000 that we don’t have. 

Not to mention that we will need to come up with $60,000 in a few years to pay for our parents’ retirements; we already raided the social security trust fund a long time ago.  How do you do all that on $27,000 a year?  Maybe rob a bank…..oh, wait, we own them now.  Never mind.

And then out of the blue Hillary grabs a microphone in Copenhagen and promises all the poor countries we will give them $1,000 because the temperature might go up…or go down…or stay the same.  

Ben Bernanke at the Fed had an idea: he took all the dollar bills out of our wallets, cut them in half and declared we had twice as much money now. So the banks could loan more to the government and charge more interest..to..themselves.  Time Magazine gave him man of the year for that one.  

Economist Stephen Moore gave me an even better idea this week, tongue in cheek; just take a sharpie and write a zero behind the number on each bill in your wallet.  That way, we would all be 10 times richer, right?  $1 turns into $10, $20 turns into $200; it’s no different than what the Fed is doing, just a bit more obvious.        

Let’s get serious.  The U.S. government is ba-roke, Barack – when are you going to get that?  And I mean everyday Lindsay Lohan broke, not just-on-taxday Donald Trump broke.  

I don’t care what Hillary said in Copenhagen, you don’t have any money to give; not $100 billion, not $100 million, not $100 thousand, not even $100.  And we aren’t giving you any more of ours; you are on your own.     

Tim Nerenz is the Libertarian Party Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin's 2nd District. To support Dr. Tim's campaign, please visit the campaign website at www.timnerenz.com.