When you are trying to get yourself out of credit debt, the first thing every advisor tells you is to sit down and write out a list of your expenses and your income, and from that create a budget that allows you to pay off your debt and live within your means. For many of us, it’s a bit of a shock to see we exactly how much more we spend than we make but being unable to raise our personal debt ceilings we then gird our proverbial loins and scrimp along on beans and rice for however long it takes us to get out of debt.
And once the credit habit has been broken, most people don’t pick it up again.
The fact that the United States has not had a budget in place since April 29, 20o9 tells us one thing: Congress critters are not normal people. They don’t live in the real world but instead think Washington, D.C. is the place where some kind of magic fairy dust turns the sweat of the laboring worker paying their taxes into “federal money” and that federal money can be pulled from thin air.
Even though it is one of Congress’ primary responsibilities to budget America’s money, Senate Majority Leader Harry (the Grinch) Reid told the Los Angeles Times recently, “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.” And Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told reporters that he planned to “defer” work on a 2012 budget indefinitely.
‘Scuse me? You are going on the record saying you flat-out REFUSE to do your job?
Oh, no. That’s not what they meant. So what we got were games and more games. A forced up-or-down Senate vote on the House-passed budget (why debate to a legitimate compromise when you can later use the vote to – wrongly – claim the GOP wants to kill Grandma). A retaliatory forced up-or-down vote on President Walking Eagle’s budget vision to encourage entitlement mentality (one so badly conceived that even the left-wing progressives voted against it and it went down in flames, 97-0).
They are acting like college students who won’t give Mommy and Daddy back their credit card or pay the bill they’ve run up on it. Not only is this childish, it is dangerous. If you and I must live within our means while providing our country with the money required to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities, then those in Congress must live within the means we are able to provide them and apply them first and foremost to those things that fulfill those Constitutional responsibilities. Like to our military and protecting our borders. Not using the sweat of our brows to allow more and more of the progressive left’s little pet “victims” to do nothing and allow those directing the flow of money to become rich doing so.
You cannot deserve what you have not earned. Congress, and this administration in particular, deserves nothing except a good knock upside its collective head.