Nathaniel

Shockey

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January 14, 2009

Americans and Debt: We’re Acting Like Children

When I was six, my dad said he’d give me five dollars if I could eat a flyer made of thick paper, which I did. I crumpled it up into little pieces and did it over the span of about an hour. My dad was rather horrified, but to his credit, the man paid up. He also wisely refrained from making loose bets with me in the future.

I spent the money I earned, along with my weekly allowance, on baseball cards. This was wise, because I had no expenses, and baseball cards are really not a bad investment. One particular 1909 Honus Wagner card is worth over a million bucks. I never found it in one of the packs I bought, but that didn’t stop me from collecting over 3,000 cards in only a few years.

As I got older, a couple bucks in weekly allowance stopped seeming like very much money. I didn’t care for buying a pack of cards as much as I cared about going to see a movie with that girl in my English class, or to play pitch and putt with my buddy. So I made a little bit more money doing things like babysitting, or helping some of my adult friends with outdoor construction projects. Or I let my friend, who actually had a regular job, pay for me when we went to swing our pitching wedges. I was quite the financial genius.

Then proms and history club trips rolled around. These cost hundreds of dollars, which I didn’t have. Actually, I doubt I’d ever even seen a hundred dollars, so my dad loaned me the money. College came around shortly thereafter, so I realized that it was time to actually get a job.

Unfortunately, I spent the money I earned on midnight bowling, 18 holes of golf, late night diner runs, or DVDs. I have a considerable DVD collection, which I still enjoy as long as I don’t think about how much money each movie represents. When college bills actually started showing up in the mail, my dad agreed to pay for some, and then agreed to pay for the rest as long as I agreed to eventually pay him back.

When I was in college, I met my future wife. She lived a thousand miles away, so we flew to see each other once every three or four weeks. I paid for these flights and our extravagant dates during these visits by holding down several jobs. I paid for school by taking out loans.

Looking back, it seems as though the older I got, the dumber I got. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that debt is a bad thing, because apparently, one is actually supposed to pay it off.

Eventually, one must learn that you don’t really own anything until you don’t owe anyone.

Eventually, one must learn that a dollar is really worth something – a dollar to be exact.

When will we learn this as a country?

This year, our estimated budget deficit is about $1.2 trillion, which, to most of us, might as well be $1.2 bajillion, or perhaps $1.2 gazillion. But no, it’s a specific amount. It’s a little over a million times a million dollars. It’s the equivalent of eating 240 billion flyers.

Who comes up with these budgets? What kind of person puts all his income in one column, all his expenses in the other, sees that the expenses outweigh the income by one trillion, two hundred billion dollars, and says to himself, “That looks about right.”

Do you know why debt sucks? First, you have to pay it off, and it’s no fun handing over money you earned to someone you owe.

The other reason debt sucks is because there comes a point when it is simply dishonorable. It’s childish, and childishness needs to stop before you start getting paid to represent the interests of the public. Our country is acting like a stupid, spoiled child. But seeing as though adults run our country, we’re acting more like the two main characters in the movie Step Brothers – fully grown and mooching off our parents.

We have to stop allowing our representatives to continue to plunge us into absurd, cartoon-like amounts of debt, and we have to be certain that our elected officials take our debt as seriously as it needs to be taken.

We can survive without riches. But once we lose our honor, little else matters.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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