Time for the budget talk

When your allowance isn’t enough, kid

HEY, BIG GUY, have a sit and let’s talk a bit. Is school going okay? Reading anything interesting? How’s the car running? Here’s hoping you’re eating something besides pizza.

Gas money? No, we’re tapped out just now. But since you mention money . . . . This came in the mail last week, and we thought we’d sit down and have a little discussion about finances and responsibility.

Yeah, you are a little old for this, but we couldn’t help but notice this credit card bill. Addressed to us.

Kid, you’re 18 trillion dollars in debt. How in the world does a body get 18 trillion dollars in debt? That’s a lot of pizza. That’s a lot of anything. Nobody else we know is 18 trillion dollars in debt. Not at your age, not at our age, not at any age. And the bill is coming here.

Now, granted, a little debt can be good. You know, get a credit history and all that. Buy a car, carry a credit card in your wallet—that’s what adults do. But how can we stress this? Eighteen trillion dollars.

Yes, we saw that you put a budget together. That’s a good start. That’s better than you’ve been able to do in some years. But you’re still spending more than you’re taking in.

What do you mean this year’s spending is “fully paid for”? Do you even know what that phrase means? Fully Paid For means you won’t spend more than you take in. Your budget for the coming year is $3.999 trillion in spending. And you expect to take in $3.5 trillion. How does that equal Fully Paid For, hmmm? Your budget deficit last year was $483 billion. This year’s looks as if it’ll be even more. And this “budget” of yours puts both deficits on the credit card.

Well, yes, we see that $483 billion isn’t as bad as the trillion-plus deficits you’ve racked up in years past, but . . . . Kid, you’re going the wrong way. Just because you don’t outspend your budget as much this year as you’ve done in past years doesn’t mean you’re making up ground. You’re still spending more than you’re taking in. Didn’t they teach math in your high school?

And the long run doesn’t look any better. It looks as though your deficits will continue to rise for the rest of the decade. You call this a budget? We call it a recipe for financial disaster.

You’re not making any cuts in expenses, but you’re adding another round of spending, asking for $478 billion in highways and bridges and the like. Actually, we can see the need for that. Bridges we’ll always need. But can’t you make cuts elsewhere? Anywhere?

Now we hear you want free tuition at community colleges—for everybody. That’ll be another 900-plus million dollars in just two years, according to the New York Times. Whether everybody enrolled in community colleges needs the help or not—or whether, if they do, they can get jobs on campus or win scholarships. A part-time job, you know, can be a real education. Ours was.

There’s more: You want $239 million to help the Environmental Protection Agency fight climate change. You want a 5.5-percent funding increase for the National Institutes of Health—however sorry its performance was during the late unlamented Ebola crisis.

Another $16 billion for yet another job training program? Whether it provides jobs or not.

How many times have you asked for, and got, an increase in your credit limit? Every time you’ve asked?

NOW YOU say you need more money. And we need to increase your allowance. You want more fees on banks and higher taxes on businesses. More taxes on the wealthy. There, that ought to encourage them to provide more jobs and hire more people.

Also, you want one-time taxes on profits that companies have kept overseas. How many times have we heard about one-time taxes? And why do they become permanent ones?

And please spare us the usual guff about finding savings in the budget by sniffing out fraud-and-waste. You say that every year. You also say you’re going to save money by spending less on health programs. When you’ve just taken over the whole country’s health-care system. Do we look that thick?

Kid, you’ve got a problem. And it’s only going to get worse as the years go by. We can’t go on spending like this. At some point, you’re going to have to come up with a budget, a real one, that not only reduces the annual deficit, but starts to cut into this credit card debt.

Eighteen trillion dollars. And you’re only making it worse.

Maybe it’s time to let the adults set your budget.

After all, the bill is coming to this address.