Replies to post #92807 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wbmw]

If you spent $1 million per day from the time of the founding of Rome – roughly 2,700 years ago – until today, you would have accumulated about $1 trillion in debt. Now, double that amount. And that's the size of our annual foreign borrowing obligation.

Metaphors can be great in illustrating the magnitude of these kinds of numbers, but the reality is that it's not just one person spending that money every day. It's a country representing hundreds of millions of people.

So, for example, if you took the population of the U.S. at roughly 300 million - and if each of these people spent just $10 per day (the cost of lunch out) - they would reach $1 trillion in less than a year.

So why does it look like I'm trying to downplay the debt? I'm not. I'm just trying to put it in a more appropriate context, because your metaphor tries to fit the national deficit into the existence of a single person, but the United States government is orders of magnitude bigger than that.

Even with Snowbama hope and change, can we fulfill the promises made to our citizens and continue to prop up and bail out Big Business?

Why do you still come back to this argument, and why do you stoop to namecalling the president? Surely you have more respect than that.

Obama has a difficult job, and the people who elected him are expecting contradictory things. They want a better economy (which costs money), they want jobs (which costs money), they want tax cuts (which costs money), they want more entitlements (which cost money), they want reform (which costs money), and they want change (which costs money)....

And on top of that, they want to reign in the debt and return to a balanced budget.

Uhh... hello...? Sorry to be sarcastic, but am I the only one who sees that it's impossible to have everything?

So how does the president do the impossible?

He doesn't. The best he can do is put the money on things that matter the most, prioritize what needs to be changed, and kill expenses that don't make sense. And yes, all this is called "common sense", but the reason we have political debates is because one person thinks Obama is spending too much, and the next one thinks he's spending too little. One gal will say that change isn't coming fast enough, and the next guy will say that Obama is moving too fast.

Most of these discussions are healthy debates, but it's not constructive when people resort to name calling, and pretending that Obama isn't taking the issues very seriously.

At the end of the day, he needs to make a decision, and it's not going to make everyone happy. But good presidents will make those decisions and suffer the consequences for what's good for the country, while the weasels you should be watching out for are the ones who promise everything, when you should know better that such a thing is not possible.