In Words of One Syllable or Less

Today is Tuesday, 1 January 2013.

Personally, I find it nearly impossible to believe that a majority of House Republicans believe the garbage they push concerning the national debt.

In case I’m wrong, I’ll use words of one syllable or less to explain it to them; perhaps their mommies can interpret.

Imagine family with one child, and an average middle-middle class income.  Imagine that junior owes a friend $10, which is all he owes anyone at the moment.  So, his equivalent of the national debt is $10.  Junior’s parents owe (mortgage, car payments, credit cards, etc.) $150,000.  Therefore, the debt of junior’s parents exceeds his by a factor of 15,000 times.

The parental debt exceeds the child’s debt by an enormous order of magnitude.  What makes this debt sustainable for the parents is access to future resources with which to pay it off, which the child doesn’t have.

The current US national debt is just short of $1.5 trillion.  A truly humongous order of magnitude greater than that of our imaginary family.

The crucial difference is that national governments have resources available beyond anything available to a family, no matter how rich it is.  For one thing, nation-states such as the US can fund deficit spending though the sales of government bonds.  For another, nation-states print money.  This can be abused, but… when foreign nations and nationals are willing to buy US bonds with a negative interest rate?  (When was the last time someone PAID YOU, to grant them the privilege of loaning you money?)

The Markets Have Spoken, and you House Repubs always claim that markets are the final arbiter.  Listen!

Why do you hate the American people so much, to throw them off the financial cliff?  (The latter would probably not be as bad as these Repubs claim, but, were it so, they’d want to be throwing anyway.)

Let the House Republicans be cursed.  May the plagues descend upon them.