Stepping it it...
Let me try to reason through this…Let’s say that my wife likes to spend money and I can’t control her compulsion. I have two college-age kids in Ivy League Schools and the cash out-flow to take care of their needs is killing me. I have four foreign cars with huge payments on each one. My house has a gigantic mortgage on it, and I am a member of not one but two exclusive country clubs…my personal banker and financial advisor calls me and says, “Randy, what’s going on? You know that since you took that pay cut to stay in Austin you won’t be able to even come close to making your payments. What are you going to do? You are in so far over your head it’s absurd.” So I reason…Borrow $750K from Uncle Bill, and I will be OK. Old Randy may figure that he is going to win the lottery so he can get flush again, or maybe he is banking on a fat inheritance down the road from that rich uncle. This kind of risky financial shenanigans may not be the worst thing in the world, and we have all heard of it before, but on an individual basis.
Isn’t this what we are doing right now on the national level? To make my little comparison a bit more accurate I guess Randy would have to be borrowing closer to $5 million. How in blazes are all these borrowed money bailouts and stimulus packages going to solve this problem. This, our financial wizards say, is the way to “solve the problem now, and not keep kicking the can down the road”. Really! Does Uncle Sam have an inheritance out there that will make him flush again? The rich uncle is for the most part China. Am I just an unfortunate optimistically challenged individual, or are we stepping into what we Texans euphemistically call deep do do.