By:  Ronald Papa

The debt crisis has brought the government to the “kitchen table” to do something that hard-pressed families do routinely, which is tear their hair out over how to pay the bills.

With less than two weeks before a Nov. 23 deadline, Congress’s “super committee” broke new ground this week, as Republicans – for the first time in 10 months – offered a plan that includes tax hikes.  “The fact that some Republicans have stepped forward to talk about revenue I think is an invitation for Democrats to step forward and talk about entitlement reform as well as spending cuts – and therein lies the core of an agreement,” said Senate deputy majority leader Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois, at a briefing with reporters Nov. 10, 2011.

The super committee is responsible for coming up with a deal by Nov. 23 that would cut at least $1.2 trillion in deficits over 10 years. The plan has to be approved by a majority of the panel itself.  The super committee has unprecedented powers to set a 10-year fiscal course for the nation and bring to the floor, without amendment or possibility of a filibuster, a deficit reduction plan. Congress has given itself until Dec. 23 to vote the final agreement up or down. If an agreement is not passed by that date, the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts are due to take hold beginning in 2013.

Frustrated by weeks of impasse, 45 senators and, more recently, 100-and counting House members bucked party lines to call on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to “go big” and put all elements on the table.

For Democrats, that means significant cuts to entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, as well as Social Security. For Republicans, it means considering tax hikes – in violation of a “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” that most have taken that commits them to opposing all tax increases. That includes cutting tax breaks, unless they are entirely offset by lower tax rates.

America’s Debt, Simplified

In short, the nation is like a family that’s overextended and close to wits’ end.

To carry on without going deeper in debt, this family would have to cut its monthly bills by 70 percent or get a huge pay increase at work, enough to raise their income by nearly two-thirds…and, like, immediately!

The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is, so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let’s put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:

It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to.  Let’s remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family:
So, in effect, last month Congress, or in this example the Jones family, sat down at the kitchen table and agreed to cut $385 from its annual budget. What family would cut $385 of spending in order to solve $16,500 in deficit spending?  It is a start, although hardly a solution.

Now after years of this, the Jones family has $142,710 of debt on its credit card (which is the equivalent of the national debt).

You would think the Jones family would recognize and address this situation, but it does not.  Neither does Congress.   The root of the debt problem is that the voters typically do not send people to Congress to save money.  They are sent there to bring home the bacon to their own home state.  To effect budget change, we need to change that job description and give Congress new marching orders. It is awfully hard (but not impossible) to reverse course and tell the government to stop borrowing money from our children and spending it now.

In effect, what we have is a reverse mortgage on the country.  The problem is that the voters have become addicted to the money. And like true addicts, the American voters are still in the denial stage, and do not want to face the possibility of going into rehab.

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