No Such Thing As A Free Lunch...

Am I getting bitter in my old age? Or, am I just seeing the world through a clearer lens?

I'm thinking...maybe hoping that its the latter of the two.

But a sure sign that you're getting older, maybe not bitter, but definitely older is when you start looking at kids and seeing their lives as easy, and their values as lacking, and their difficulties as laughable.

Bearing that in mind, it also strikes me as strange just how dependent we have become as a culture as a whole. We depend of so many different moving parts to conduct our daily lives that I'm not sure if we could hack it otherwise.

Now, as a generation, the one before me was one of unparalleled gluttony. Boomers are easily the most entitled of all generations. They don't really worry too much about the future because their future has already been secured and its been secured on the backs of today's and tomorrow's workers. For example, ME!

Just say the words "Reform Social Security" and you will won't be able to get elected to the local PTA board.

So here's the thing. Everyone knows on some level that nothing is free. Someone always has to pay for it. Regardless of what it is, somebody paid the bill. The Rothschild's do not work for free kids.

Social security is paid for by workers currently working. If you're drawing social security now all your money went to keep your parents quiet.

Roads, bridges, schools, cops, firemen, teachers, soldiers, VA benefits, FICA, and on and on it goes. All things we, as a nation, had to pay for.

So riddle me this, why is it that if you ask your average American sheep about what's wrong with the government, sooner or later in that conversation spending will come up. When it does, you are almost guaranteed to hear something along the lines of, "We have to cut spending."

Now, ask him/her where to cut spending.

Social Security? No way, I want that so I don't have to work forever.
Food Stamps/Welfare? Maybe, so long as the person doesn't know anyone on it, or is on it themselves.
Military? Not a chance, Americans love to kill people and break things.
Medicare/Medicaid? Sure, they'll get on board with that so long as you don't cut their entitlements.
Education? You just sound like a dick if you want to cut this.

And around and round you'll go. Sure there's a few things that we all can agree on. Politician salaries and pensions, sure fuck them guys. Government employee salaries and pensions, sure why not, until you realize that over 2 million mother fuckers work for the government and that's not counting the military. Cut all of that and all of a sudden you've got a lot more mouths in the bread lines.

Basically, what I'm saying is that Americans are, for lack of a better term, stupid. They want all this good shit the government does for them, but they don't want to pay for it, and when you finally beat it into their skulls that something has got to give or the whole thing is going tits up, then they pick the thing that is furthest from them to go after. Cut it all!!! They say. Just not MY STUFF!!!!

Any of you brilliant financial scholars understands that if you take in $10, you can only spend $10 or you can go into debt. In which case you can spend until you max out your available credit. Then you're done and you have to spend 40 years paying that shit off, or you could call Dave Ramsey and do it in about 45 minutes or so.

Now imagine you live in a land where all you have to do to get a higher credit limit is sign a piece of paper. Doesn't mean anything. You didn't change the amount you make or anything like that. You just magically increased you credit limit. Just because you said so. Then you could continue to buy whatever the hell you wanted until you run out of credit again, and then you sign another piece of paper that increases your borrowing power again. Once again, you didn't actually do anything, you just decided that you were going to borrow more, so you did.

Sounds like a great place to me.

That piece of paper is the debt ceiling. And someday its going to come crashing down on all of us.

Americans need to pull their head out of their collective asses. We've allowed two generations to write a whole bunch of checks that we're going to have to cash. Now sooner or later we're going to have to make a deposit. The longer we wait the bigger it gets.

Pretty soon it'll be bigger than all of us, it may already be. Nothing is free. Somebody is going to pay.

Get ready, the bill is in the mail.