A group of people from Greece came by the front porch the other day. They were seemingly very intelligent, interesting and industrious folks. Seemed to be very outgoing and gregarious as well because they stopped to talk to me about the fact that their country is completely broke. Not individuals or companies within the country--the whole country. How does that happen? Well, apparently if you spend more than you take in for decade after decade and finance the deficit with someone else and the someone else eventually decides to not finance--you can go broke. They explained the math to me. Ten units of exchange in and 15 out equals 5 units of negative exchange. I said this sounds very similar to what might happen to an individual or company if they decide to do business the same way and they agreed that I had the concept down pretty well.
I was curious. How can you fix such a situation? They said, "Certainly not with these damn austerity measures that are being voted in by our government!" It sounded as if the government was trying to cut spending (outgoing exhange) and increase taxes (ingoing exchange) to convince the European Union finance group to extend a huge amount of credit to finance the country for a few more minutes. They could not imagine the government cutting back on payments out, especially benefits to the citizens, and also asking people to pay more taxes to balance things out. I decided to tell them a story. "When I was very young I collected marbles. At times we would have contests with them and challenge other marble players to various games. If you were victorious over the opponent--you kept the marbles at play. One day, I got into a marbles match with an older, wiser and much better marble player. I lost all the marbles I had taken to play against him with. I ran home crying. My parents quizzed me as to the problem and I told them about being completely hammered by the older, much better marble player. They accompanied me to his home where they asked that he give back the marbles. He was very agreeable and gave them all back!"
The Greeks looked at me very curiously. "What does this story have to do with our situation?" I just told them that if you lose your marbles, maybe you could ask for them back. I thought maybe the outgoing exchange money could just be given back, then everything would be great in Greece and they wouldn't have to riot and beat up on their fellow police citizens. They stormed away saying something about me losing my marbles and they were pretty sure I had never gotten any back.
I sat on the front porch for a while and pondered the conversation. Then I thought, "It seems as if this story is being told around the good old USA as well." I remembered seeing that a few states had run in to the same problem. More money going out that in. Hey--I remembed that the feds had been talking about a similar situation as well. One of my own senators, Mike Lee, said, "I won't vote to raise the debt ceiling until we come up with some changes to balancing the budget." I wasn't sure that is what he really said, but it seemed pretty close.
An assocate had told me. It is very simple. Those wealthy people can just pay more taxes. We can pretend we are cutting back on some government benefit payments to everyone and do some tricky accounting and everything will be great. I had wondered at the time, "This does sound like a good idea." I knew that those wealthy people had plenty of dough. They couldn't possibly miss a few hundred thouand dollars and some might not even have to pay that much--maybe only tens of thousands of dollars. Then the associate showed me the proposals. "Wait a minute I said!" This looks like I am one of those wealthy people! I am not wealthy by my standards, but apparently some guy who got elected President, who appears to have never run a business, but went to school a lot and organized a lot of communities (community organizer) thinks I am perfect to solve the situation. He also thinks we should make sure everyone gets a lot of health and other benefits, especially if they never had them and couldn't posssibly afford them ever in their lives.
All that hard work for 37 years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes paid. And now, I have to pay more so that we don't riot and beat up on our own police. The Greeks were right--someone had lost their marbles.
