David McElroy

The priorities of elected officials are warped, even when they’re dealing with public safety.

Because of serious budget cuts and possible bankruptcy, the county where I live has had to make severe cutbacks. The Jefferson County sheriff fought the cuts tooth and nail, trying to get his department exempt from the layoffs all the other departments were facing.

When his budget was finally cut in June — after the defeat of a legislative bill that would have allowed the county to raise taxes — Sheriff Mike Hale announced that his deputies would no longer have time to respond to calls about accidents in unincorporated parts of the county. It struck me as a petulant move to try to create pain on the part of the public and create pressure to get his budget back.

Friday, his busy deputies found time for some real police work. Sheriff’s deputies raided a couple of bingo parlors that were using electronic bingo machines that the sheriff and the state believe are illegal. The bingo operators have had some success in court arguing that their machines don’t violate state anti-gambling laws. Either way, the law and court rulings on the issue aren’t clear, so it’s far from clearcut about whether any laws are being broken.

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Nobody can really comprehend the numbers in the federal budget. They’re just too big for us to wrap our minds around. Even millions of dollars are hard for normal people to comprehend, much less billions or trillions.

But things are different in Washington. I’ve always thought the typical D.C. attitude toward money was summed up in the famous quote from powerful U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen back in the ’60s, who said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Radio talk show host and personal financial guru Dave Ramsey puts the federal budget into perspective by proportionately shrinking the numbers down to that of a family budget:

‎”If the U.S. government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year and are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing bigspending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget and debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.”

The truth is that politicians aren’t going to get serious about cutting spending. In Ramsey’s family budget example, they needed to cut $17,000 in expenses, but just arguing about federal budget cuts proportionate to $3,000 in family budget cuts made people in D.C. scream bloody murder.

No, nobody is going to stop the runaway debt train. It’s far too late. Just know the facts and be prepared.

Most people are accustomed to having something less than perfect credit, but the U.S. government has been considered to be the gold standard — irony intended — of borrowers. It was always believed that no one was more certain to repay debts than the U.S. government. That all changed Friday night.

The rating agency, Standard & Poor’s, cut the federal debt rating from AAA to AA+, which might have a significant effect on the interest that the government pays to borrow its ever-increasing pile of debt. You can read the press release from S&P explaining its decision here.

I’m less concerned about what this is going to mean on Wall Street and in the White House than with what the ripple effects are going to be like for the rest of us. Could this be the beginning of toppling the economic system? It’s hard to imagine that, but I do think things are going to get much worse.

My first reaction is that all of us need to accelerate our plans for providing safe places for our families. The worst might not yet be there, but then again, it might.