The debt limit is in the news again, so this satire, from a few months back, remains timely:
Tag: debt limit
If you can’t pay your bill at a restaurant, management may set you to washing dishes to cover the cost of your meal.
Or so it’s said — I’ve never heard of it actually happening. Clean dishes are a must for serving food to paying customers; restaurants simply can’t wait around to press non-paying customers into service. Instead, they hire folks to do the dishes.
This came to mind when our president and congressional leaders began pushing to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion.
The raise would allow the federal debt to increase to $14.3 trillion, about the size of our country’s entire yearly economic output.
Senator Max Baucus of Montana is all for raising the limit. He says it simply must be done: “We have gone to the restaurant,” he explained. “We have eaten the meal. Now the only question is whether we will pay the check.”
No dishwashing for Baucus.
Most of us avoid Congress’s unseemly situation by looking in our wallets for cash or ready credit before we order the filet mignon, not after we’ve consumed it.
I’m no wizard of high finance, but hey: If we want to stop piling debts onto our children, at some point we will have to prevent our so-called representatives from borrowing more trillions.
Oh, and if a congressman enters your diner, better make him pay cash up front.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.