Too Many Zeros

Let me make one thing clear: I am damn near as liberal as they get. It baffles me that this country does not have the greatest public school system in the world. I'm surprised how ignorant people are about health care. I'm dumbfounded that people even care if the LGBT community wants to marry one another.

However, despite all of that, I want to apologize to our future generations for our lack of fiscal responsibility. As a younger man, without much money, my father would often tell me, "It's not how much money you make, it's what you do with it." And he lived that advice. I tried to live it to. I also would fantasize about what I would do with certain sums of money, but my fantasies always stopped right around at $100,000,000USD because it always proved too hard to think of much more money than that. Now a days, we have musicians and sports stars who will eventually make, or who already have made, that much money.

We have billionaires who gave $4,000,000USD to Haiti, and they are called heroes. If you are worth $30,000,000,000USD you will make over $4,000,000 every day just from an interest rate of 8%! I'm rambling. I apologize, readers. Let us now get back to the matter at hand: Fiscal Responsibility.

Andrew Jackson, our 7th President of the United States, made it his goal as president to remove the national debt. He's the only president to do so. The year before he took office in 1829, the debt was over $67,000,0000USD. By 1835 it was $33,733.05USD! What a feat! Can you even imagine? Today, the debt has not been under $2,000,000,000USD in over one hundred years! And today, the debt is at damn near $13,000,000,000,000USD. It is one great big ponzi scheme! This is not O.K. Not even Old Hickory can help us now.

Clinton had it right for a little while: A government surplus, slowly paying down the debt. It was the best he could do. But then BushII lost his veto pen and his RNC handbook and signed off on every piece of legislation his Republican Senate passed. Those past eight years were scarier than the movie 28 Days Later. In that movie raging human zombies rip the world apart and humanity falls apart. During BushII below average students from this country’s top universities take over our government and country, remove all the checks and balance, invade Iraq with troops that don't know how to say "hello" in Arabic (As-Salaam-Alaikum) and make a total mess of the place. This includes the Nation Debt.

Don't get me wrong, Obama has not much helped in this situation either, but damn do I feel bad for the man. He's doing what the presidents before him did, even Jackson, when there is a problem, such as if the last administration had made a mess of things, you throw a lot of money around in hopes that it fixes things. Two years after Jackson all but removed the national debt, our country was hit with a depression in 1837. The Debt went from $33,733.05USD in 1835 to $10,434,221.14USD in 1839. By 1844, when this depression was finally easing, the Debt was at $32,742,922.00USD.

This lack of fiscal responsibility is nothing more than a status quo, but damn don't I seeing it biting us in the ass pretty hard eventually. And so again I say to our future generations: Please forgive us.