You can be for a smaller government or a bigger one but you
have to pay your bills.
My cousin Mona called me the other day about
her husband Harry, who had come home from work and said:
“We’re spending too much money, Mona. It’s got
to stop. We’re going broke.”
“Really? I thought we were doing OK, sort of.”
“OK? Look at the stack of bills on my desk.
You call that OK?”
“It’s
not as though we’re big spenders, Harry. Most of our money goes for household
expenses — food and rent and things like that. What’s left over goes into
Sonny’s education fund or for insurance.”
“Education. Insurance. That’s what I’m talking
about. We don’t have enough money for frills. We have to cancel the insurance.”
“Life is full of risks. Look both ways when
you cross the street and you’ll be fine. If we keep spending like this, we have
no future.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do. I’ve
already cut our food budget down to the bone. I suppose we could get rid of
cable television.”
“And miss football? Not a chance. That’s a
necessity. No, we’ll have to cut something else.”
“Like what?”
“Bills. We’re going to stop paying our bills.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. See this MasterCard bill here?
We throw it away. Ignore it. That’s $500 saved right there.”
“You can’t do that. We’ve already spent that
money. We owe it.”
“Just because you owe it doesn’t mean you have
to pay it.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Congress. That’s your problem — you’re not
informed. The Republican tea party people are refusing to raise the debt
ceiling and the government isn’t going to be able to pay its bills. If Congress
can do it, why can’t I? Anyway, who told MasterCard to lend us the money in the
first place? It made a bad loan. It should pay the price.”
“But it will ruin our credit rating.”
“Credit ratings are overrated. My head’s made
up. We have to think of the future.”
“I am thinking of the future. It’s got bars on
it.”
“You’re always so negative.”
“Mother always said you were a flake. I should
have listened to her and married Leroy. He had a good job in his uncle’s funeral
home.”
“What’s good enough for Congress is good
enough for me.”
Mona asked me what she should do. I told her.
A week later she called back with the rest of the story.
She had Harry committed to the Rush Limbaugh
Home for the Conservative and Bewildered where he’s been elected vice-president
of a deadbeat support group. He sits there all day writing abusive emails to
his Congressman, she said. He seems happy. She’s on welfare and their son has
quit school and is working at a carwash.
Which is pretty much the kind of future that
awaits most of us if the tea-partying lamebrains in Congress have their way
with us on the debt limit.
How can stiffing your creditors be a good
idea? I mean, you can be for a smaller government or a bigger one but you have
to pay your bills.
The idea, I suppose, is that the consequences
of not raising the ceiling are so dire that President Barack Obama and the rest
of the Democrats will be forced to cave in (again) and give the Republicans
what they want — namely the delay and/or death of an expansion of the nation’s
health insurance options.
Well, given Obama’s performance so far, they
have a right to hope. But he has said he will not negotiate the matter with
them. I don’t see how he can back away from that stance.
If he lets the Republicans push him around on
this issue one more time, he might as well move to Hawaii and govern by email
for the next three years.
Either that or declare the presidency vacant —
which some people think has already been done.
Stay tuned.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org
