What would happen to you if you spent all the income you expect to earn this year -- plus a lot more?
You know the bad answer! But unfortunately, President Barack Obama apparently doesn't.
With the United States facing more than $14 trillion in national debt, President Obama is proposing to spend all of the too-high taxes we currently expect to have coming in -- plus $1.6 trillion more!
And then he wants to repeat red-ink spending the following year, adding to the debt and adding to the interest taxpayers have to pay on it.
Mr. Obama wants to spend $3.72 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year -- and then spend $3.834 trillion more in fiscal 2011!
But we aren't taking in that much even with too-high taxes.
We are in an economic recession. That means taxes are bringing in a lot less money for government than Washington is spending, by a big margin.
Consider the "gross domestic product." It's the total value of all we produce in the United States.
Now consider that the Obama budget calls for spending a record high 25 percent of all that!
Who will pay for it? The obvious and inevitable answer is that "we" will, plus our children and grandchildren and so on.
Nobody is planning ever to pay off the national debt.
But is it wise to keep increasing it by trillions of dollars of irresponsible spending, draining productive capital out of our economy, and having to pay more interest?
If you had a detailed list of every item in the $3.72 trillion Obama spending proposal, don't you believe you could cut out enough unconstitutional, wasteful, unsound vote-buying and similar items at least to reduce the $1.6 trillion deficit?
We elect our president and members of Congress to handle our national finances. Why don't we expect -- why don't we demand -- that they use the kind of financial common sense and responsibility that you have to exercise to keep from going broke?