Did you read the book by Herman Wouk? There are a lot of lessons in that book that we should all understand. What would happen if we stopped the carnival and paid up all of our outstanding bills? One of the problems is that we don't even know how much we have spent on steak that we have already eaten. The book keeping at all levels of government hide what we really owe. Look at all the government employees who have a big money coming in the future in the form of retirement. We will be paying for years into the future for work that these retired government employees did years ago. This is exactly like paying ten years from now the steak that we ate last year. The official federal debit is now over $17 trillion, but that does not count 100% of what we really owe.
Most people do not know that it is against the law for a private company to keep books like our governmental units do. What would you think about a company that kept books like our government? Rather than paying their employees 100% of their pay, they only paid 50% and promised to pay the other 50% some time in the future. What if this company then showed a set of books that showed that they were making a profit, but did not show the fact that they still owed the additional 50% pay to all their workers? That is exactly what our government does.
The reason that this all seems to work is because all expect the government to go on forever and that the day will never come when they will have to pay all their bills. I told this story before, but it applies here. When I was a kid, about every few months we flushed out the rats under the concrete floor in the barn. We hardly ever saw a rat running around, but we knew they were there. When we rand the water down their holes, more rats than we ever thought came out and the dogs killed them. The point is that a hidden problem is always worse than most people thought. The same thing happened in New Orleans due to the flooding after the hurricane. We all knew there were a lot of criminals in New Orleans, but we had no idea that so many would be flushed out by the flooding.
I don't know how we are ever going to get our governmental units to keep honest books. First, we need voters who know something about accounting practice and simple math. What is happening is the voters are getting stupider in math.
