You know what really frosts my flakes?
Government debt.
The news this week is that the outstanding U.S. national debt has blown past $40 trillion.
FORTY TRILLION DOLLARS!
That’s roughly $116,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Sadly, it only includes federal spending, not state and local government debt.
Imagine a family of four opening the mailbox and finding its share of the national credit card bill:
Congratulations! You owe about $464,000. That’s more than a very nice house in much of America and Washington is still shopping.
But $40 trillion is such an absurd number that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. So let’s put it into perspective.
Imagine $1 million represented by a stack of $1,000 bills about four inches tall.
A billion dollars is 1,000 million. So, that stack would be about 333 feet tall, or roughly a 33-story skyscraper.
A trillion dollars is 1,000 billion. So, that stack would stretch more than 63 MILES into the sky. Now multiply that by 40.
A stack of $1,000 bills representing our $40 trillion national debt would stretch more than 2,500 miles.
That’s roughly the distance from New York City to Los Angeles.
Here’s what will blow your mind. Lay that stack on its side and drive alongside it nonstop at 65 miles per hour. For more than 2,500 miles, you will pass another MILLION DOLLARS every four inches!
How in the world do you spend that much money?
Yet, in a few months, Americans will go to the polls and vote for whichever slippery politician promises them even MORE free stuff.
Free health care!
Free college!
More subsidies!
More government programs!
More benefits!
Don’t worry about paying for it. We’ll just TAX THE RICH! Oh, that’s brilliant.
There’s just one little problem. “The rich” don’t have that much money.
According to IRS data, more than 41 million tax returns reported adjusted gross income of more than $100,000. That can include married couples whose combined income exceeds $100,000.
Together, those returns accounted for roughly $10.7 trillion in adjusted gross income.
So let’s conduct a little Grandpa Grumpy economic experiment.
Forget raising their tax rates. Forget taxing them at 40%, 50% or even 90%. Let’s take EVERYTHING.
We will take every single dollar of adjusted gross income reported by taxpayers making more than $100,000 — down to the penny.
Congratulations! You’ve financially wiped out a huge portion of America’s taxpayers and collected roughly $10 trillion.
And guess what? You STILL haven’t come close to paying off the national debt.
You’d still have around $30 TRILLION left! And that’s before the government spends another dime. Which it will. Over and over again.
Then let’s pretend, impossibly, that confiscating all that income wouldn’t change anybody’s behavior or shrink the economy one bit.
The point isn’t that wealthy Americans shouldn’t pay taxes. They already do, and reasonable people can argue all day about how much they should pay.
The point is that you cannot tax your way out of uncontrolled spending.
When a family spends more than it earns year after year, eventually somebody has to say, “STOP SPENDING!”
When a business spends more than it earns year after year, it eventually goes bankrupt.
But, when the federal government spends more than it collects year after year, the same clowns who got us into this mess keep getting re-elected.
Apparently, the best solution politicians can come up with is to borrow another trillion dollars and argue about which group of Americans isn’t paying its “fair share.”
I’m Grandpa Grumpy, and America doesn’t have a $40 trillion debt because Washington couldn’t find enough people to tax.
We have a $40 trillion debt because Washington can’t figure out how to stop spending money it doesn’t have.
And when you’re already $40 trillion in the hole, the first thing you should probably do is STOP DIGGING!