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.
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