Borrowed Time

I don't find it strange that it's taken our representatives over thirty six months -- as long as I've been blogging -- to even begin to address American structural indebtedness, let alone take any actions to reverse our three decades long debt fueled lifestyle.

No, I don't find it strange. We have failed to address it for almost as long as I've been gravitationally tied to this rock. There is no coincidence, as I've mentioned multiple times here, that my city government, my county government, my state government, my federal government, and the vast majority of my neighbors are all up over their eyeballs in debt.

This Simpson-Bowles commission -- I don't see it doing a damn thing. Extending the age of social security recipients out to the year 2075?

Really? What about 2005? What about 2015?

Not only doesn't this address the problems at hand, there is no way, no way, we're going to get any reduced spending/increase in taxes with a split Congress...as evidenced by our failures to get any reduced spending/increase in taxes at any time Congress was partisan. We won't do it, we won't take the haircuts we need because we know what the end result always is; we can't accept the fact that we've been living beyond our means.

This nation's constituents don't have any idea , not even close, what it means to live below their means.

For the past five thousand, five hundred days I've known what it's like to live on borrowed time; at any other time in human history I would have been dead from juvenile diabetes for that long. Every day going forward is, in some sense, borrowed. This helped shape my personal financial outlook -- live within my means, live to where I don't need insurance because I'd never qualify for it, and so on. As a consequence, I don't [yet] have the Yukon in the garage with the $6k tires/wheels.

Interestingly, during the decade long Bush tax cuts, what did we do with all that increased personal income? How is it that we are all so broke? Not only that, we have nice aftermarket rims on our social security program, on our medicare, on our medicaid, on our soldier's MRAPs, but we've not yet paid for them.

I see at least two years of paralyzing inaction by our federal government to address any of this shit. We are too polarized to compromise; we won't. We cannot accept reduced services while we cannot pay for them, and that I see portends a rather bleak future for most of us.