Needs, Wants and Debt

Our human body contains in excess of 37 trillion cells. Any beach is a huge collection of individual grains of sand. The number of individual geometric patterns contained in a one inch overnight snow shower is impossible to count. A new earth is apparently only four light years away if we can travel at 186,232 miles per second for four entire years. These numbers baffle me.

A twenty trillion dollar national debt is such a number. The debt, however, can be viewed as a manageable $65,000 personal debt for every man, woman and child in this country through simple division. It does not include the debt carried by states, cities or ourselves but it is a number easily understood, managed and feared.

In the absence of real emergencies there is, and there always has been, a straight forward solution to debt management for you, your family, any city, any state and our national government. All that is required is the understanding of the value of a budget and knowing the difference between "I need" and "I want because". When our national financial end arrives, and it will, it will arrive not in the arms of “need” but on the back of “I want because”.

We must recognize and understand that all budgets seek a balance of what we need and can afford not what we want. Increased taxation and the printing of money on demand by our government will never meet the costs of  “I want because”. We all “want because” and that is the real point. Correct choices are what budgets are for. Politicians should spend resources on needs but they get more votes for providing wants. Tell politicians to provide you what you need and not what you want. There is a difference.