There’s a furniture
company in Southern Maine called “Chapter 11 Furniture.” The name and the
entire concept of the company is to invoke the feeling of a fire sale.
They have 4 or 5
stores that they only sign short leases on, so at any given time they
can advertise, “Chapter 11 Furniture is losing its lease in (enter town or
street name here) and EVERYTHING MUST GO!”
It’s a brilliant
tactic for a company who will probably never resort to its name because it
understands how to build from American greed at its very core. Someone is going
out of business or declaring bankruptcy? It’s a free for all!
That’s the American mentality surrounding bankruptcy. Bankruptcy
is there to help people in severe financial situations put their debt behind
them and move on. It’s also a way for shysters to get a bunch of free stuff,
make a bunch of money and work the system.
Donald Trump qualifies as the second type; working the system —
and openly admitting it — 4 times now. Trump’s idea to “fix America” has taken
a turn toward this mentality and the very thought of it is frightening,
The New York
Times reported that in an interview, Donald
Trump talked about how he would approach the national debt.
Thinking like a failed businessman, he insisted we should simply
go to our creditors and ask them to take less.
Yes, in one idiotic statement, Donald Trump exposed just how
little he knows about the economy or how the debt works.
As The Times points out, there is no credible evidence suggesting that our debtors would reduce we owe them by a nickel.
Trump thinks he’s dealing in people with real estate they can’t
move selling bad debt for more bad debt until one day so much of the debt is
paper — bad paper — that there’s nothing left to do but fail.
Sound familiar? It should; it’s what Wall Street and the Dubya
administration did to us in 2008.
Let’s assume for a moment that our creditors would take less.
The bulk of the national debt is money we owe to ourselves.
Is Trump going to ask the Social Security trust fund to take
pennies on the dollar because we had a couple of wars that were too expensive
and some handouts to fix the mess?
How much less should those people who won’t be able to retire
when the fund is wiped out take? They’ve been putting 6.2 percent of their
paycheck into that fund since they started working.
How much less should they settle for?
As for our other creditors, we’re not defaulting on rented
furniture. We owe other countries a great deal of money, plus interest, that
they provided to us in cash.
We use that money to fund the government. If creditors start
seeing those kinds of tactics we’ll have our credit rating lowered and lose
credibility as a country.
There’s also a good chance the dollar would be removed as the
world standard currency. Ask Donald Trump what he’ll do when we can’t just
print more money.
The bottom line is, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about.
The national debt is one of the most misunderstood components of the federal
government.
For someone to seek the office that holds much influence over
how that debt shrinks or grows without understanding it is preposterous, but
then again — we are talking about Donald Trump.
Author Charles
Topher is a lifetime lefty liberal from Lowell who has managed to
migrate (legally) to the backwoods of Maine. He writes from a 1 acre
progressive bubble where Nobama stickers on pickemup truck bumpers are common.