Happy Monday morning, everybody. We just hit another milestone on the road to ruin.
It seems like only August [Editor's note: it was only August, Steve.] that I brought you the happy news that the interest payment on our debt was about to hit ONE TRILLION DOLLARS and that it had already eclipsed defense spending. Here we are, just four months later almost exactly to the day, and the vig is up more than 10% to $1.1 trillion.
I'll type the full number for effect: $1,100,000,000,000.
Defense spending — including aid to Ukraine and Israel — is a smaller fraction of our nation's wealth than it has been since World War II, except for a couple of years right before 9/11 when we mistakenly believed we'd never have to fight a major war again. So don't you isolationists out there blame foreign aid (barely more than one percent of spending) or nasty "forever wars" for our pending fiscal doom. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq didn't help, to be sure, but I have met the enemy and he is us, baby — you and me and our fellow 335 million Americans with our endless appetite for federal spending.
Let me show you.
Federal revenues for the year are a little over $4.4 trillion, which doesn't even come close to covering Uncle Sugar's $6.3 trillion "budget." Those are huge numbers, so let me give you a little perspective.
Imagine you earn the average U.S. monthly income of $4,665. Now imagine that a quarter of your income — about $1,166 — goes to your Visa card.
Pretty stupid of you, right?
But it gets worse.
You didn't put any major appliances or make any kind of life-enhancing improvements while running up all that credit card debt. You spent it all on Cheetos and Scratcher tickets, none of which paid off more than a few bucks. Any small windfalls you blew on more Cheetos.
How you did that, you have no idea. But Washington's version of high-calorie/low-nutrition Cheetos consists of stimulus checks, welfare benefits of every imaginable kind, student loans, etc — pretty much everything but the very few things that the Constitution authorizes Washington to do. D.C.'s Scratchers is spending on green energy boondoggles that will never pay off and on wars they have no intention of winning.
But hang on; we aren't done with the stupid.
The Visa bill you're spending 25% of your income on will never get paid off. Ever. It's an interest-only bill with zero paydown on the principle. As you continue to put more Cheetos and Scratchers on the Visa — you have no plan to cut down on the Cheetos or Scratchers — your total debt will never go anywhere but up.
Meanwhile, your retirement plan — if you're GenX or younger — consists of a desk drawer stuffed with IOUs you wrote to yourself.
You've been counting on interest rates coming down to provide you with some relief and someday, eventually, they probably will. But before that happens, you have tens of thousands of dollars in low-interest purchases of Cheetos and Scratchers that are going to get rolled over into higher rates.
That's how your monthly payments rose so quickly to almost $1,200 from just $400 a couple of years ago. By this time next year, you'll look back fondly on your $1,166 Visa bill.
By the way, your boss just called you into his office to say you'll be taking a small pay cut next year on top of the cut you took this year. In other words, federal tax revenues have been shrinking since last year and will do it again in 2024. Remember that the next time some lefty tries to tell you how well the economy is doing.
So you might as well grab a couple more Family Size bags of Cheetos and some more Scratchers on your way home because that's what Washington would do.
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