If you are sitting around worrying about how your kids and grandkids are going to pay off the what economists, politicians, columnist, talk radio hosts and others call the national debt you are getting ulcers for nothing. The simple truth is they are not going to pay it off. To put it in the vernacular, they ain’t gonna pay it off.

If you call our government spending more money than it’s taking in a debt, the United States of America has not been out of debt for 175 years. That’s nigh on 80 percent of our history as a constitutional republic and nearly three-quarters of our history as an independent nation. Each generation has not only failed to pay off the reported debt in money but has also increased it in dollars and cents. The claim  during the Clinton and Nixon administrations that the national debt was being reduced was a delusion by using Social Security income for general fund spending.

Nevertheless, we have not only survived these 172 years but also prospered. That’s because what is called the National Debt is not really a debt. That term is used because of our determination to define everything in dollars and cents. If you literally believe word for word the account of creation found in Genesis I challenge you, no dare you, to find any mention that God created money - dollars and cents - on any of those first six days. When Jesus sent his Apostles on their conversion missions he didn’t give them expense money.

What we call a debt is simply living off the wealth of the nation. The wealth of the nation is many times the number of dollars coming from the federal print shop and mints. The true wealth of the nation was many times more than any deficit in dollars and cents. For all but the most recent times the American people created far more over-all national wealth than was recorded in the budget.

It was done through the best economic system in existence, free enterprise. People who had some money invested it wisely to create more real wealth in return for a
“FAIR” return on their investment. Those who couldn’t invest worked hard to produce that which the investors made possible in a return for a fair and reasonable wage. It was private enterprise at it’s best, interspersed with as minimum and proper amount of responsibility to our neighbors which some misname socialism.

For most of those 175 years of  “National Debt” the American people were creating far more wealth than they were using up. Despite some low times, both the investing public and the laboring public lived if not in the laps of luxury certainly in great comfort. The fallacy of our unique private enterprise, free economy is that if we use more of our total wealth than which is created new, both by man and by God, then we won’t just go bankrupt, we’ll cease to exist. Free enterprise is not immune from the enemy of all mankind, greed.

Sure, greed is a sin and has always existed, and exists in all of us to a degree. But in recent years that greed has become horrendous. We have had an epidemic of the Silas Marner syndrome.

Investors no longer are satisfied with a fair return, they want it all. Labor continues to and demand more  while doing less and less work. The result is that we have created less and less national wealth and more and more expenditure of our national wealth.

There is an old Kansas folk song that proclaims you never miss the water till the well runs dry.

Forget worrying about the national debt in dollars and cents and fret about spending more of the total wealth of the nation while creating less and less.

A colony is a place which sends much of its resources to other places where more it is used to create more wealth for others. Have we forgotten that some 230 years ago we got fed up with being colonies?

Trivia Time
Despite his comic parts, Lou Costello was highly skilled in a sport. What was the sport? Answer to last question. The two most often mentioned Scotland Yard detective in the Sherlock Holmes cases were Lestrade and Gregson.

Contact George Frasher at 337-238-3433, E-mail frasher@cebridge.net.