Do you remember the very end of the movie Animal House? Future U.S. Senator John Blutarsky drives away (presumably toward Washington, D. C.) with his kidnap victim/bride-to-be, toward a career in politics. The scriptwriters didn't warn us that the Senator (who flunked out of college with a zero point zero G.P.A.) was going to be given an unrestricted credit card with no limits, or that the American taxpayer will ultimately get stuck with the bill -- because that isn't even remotely funny -- but it's absolutely true. During the 2016 fiscal year, tax revenue collected by the U.S. Treasury was approximately $2.99 trillion dollars. Even more amazingly, the federal government managed to spend about $3.54 trillion dollars, increasing the national debt by another $500 billion dollars. What spendthrifts we've elected to Congress! If only we were talking about Monopoly money, the national debt wouldn't be that big of a deal. However, these are real U.S. dollars we're talking about. Eventually, that debt will need to be repaid. I believe I read somewhere that every American citizen -- every man, woman, and child -- would need to come up with more than $60,000 in order to pay their share of the federal debt. In 2008, at the beginning of President Obama's first term, the federal debt was roughly $10.7 trillion dollars. As of this writing, the federal debt has grown to more than $19.9 trillion dollars and counting, with no end in sight. How is this even possible? Part of the problem is that Congress and the federal government have totally divorced themselves from … [Read more...]