David McElroy

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.

In Atlanta, the government-operated school system was caught earlier this year in long-term cheating on standardized tests. Although the Washington Post is a big defender of government schools, even the Post called the details “shocking.”

Teachers, principals and administrators were all caught up in cheating by a system that was said to use fear and intimidation to get teachers to go along with the scheme. (At the same link, you can find links to PDFs of the full state report, which details just how corrupt the system has been.)

The people who are most cheated by this are the students and parents. Students have resources that are supposed to be used to educate them being used instead to finance a world-class cheating operation. Parents who send their kids to schools and see positive test scores believe their kids are getting the education they need, so they have been cheated and lied to. The kids are too young to understand how they’re being cheated, but the parents would be justified in feeling intense rage.

The parents, it turns out, aren’t angry. In fact, at a public meeting Tuesday night in southwest Atlanta, they lined up to sing the praises of their schools and defend the teachers who had been cheating their kids. Seriously. I’m not making this up.

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