So, were you surprised by the recent, so-called GSA (General Services Administration) scandal? Shocked? Maybe. Alarmed? Angry? You should be both! It was our money they were spending and as of this writing, with hearings just getting started, it looks as though this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I doubt that you were surprised. How could you be? With out-of-control spending in Washington having ballooned our national debt to nearly 16 trillion dollars—that’s sixteen TRILLION, with a “T”—we all knew that “oversights” like this were probably common. We just don’t want to believe it. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a bad dream where I keep repeating, “This can’t be happening. There’s no way they would do this.” But they do, do it—and they just keep on doing it.
I grew up in the 1960s—the era of Vietnam and “flower power,” when mistrust of big government became mainstream. Maybe you weren’t around yet but some of us remember the revelations of $400 hammers and thousand-dollar toilet seats—all products of the “military-industrial complex.” This propensity to spend without limit is nothing new, but the problem is, it’s getting worse, as that glaring “T” number above bears witness.
One thousand, thousand is one million. One thousand, million is one billion. A thousand billion is one trillion. To get a picture of what a trillion dollars looks like, a stack of $1,000 bills, four inches high, is one million dollars. A stack of $1,000 bills 358 feet high is a billion dollars. With a trillion, your stack is 67.9 MILES high. You’d have to be launched ten times higher than the space station orbit—over 1,086 miles into space—just to see the top of a stack of $1,000 bills. hat is our current (and growing) national debt.
Just how much debt is that, really? It translates into over $50,000 dollars for every citizen—every man, woman, child, infant—in the United States. Is that a lot? The Treasury Secretary of the United States, Timothy Geithner, apparently doesn’t think so. He recently appeared on Meet the Press and spoke of our national debt as if it were little more than a modest nuisance—something that will be handled in due time.
I know I’ll get some flack for saying this, but my 1960’s upbringing won’t allow me suppress it, so here goes: Thank God for the Tea Party! They were the ones that most recently started shining some light into the filthy, black hole of unaccountable government spending.
As the GSA debacle unfolds, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn about legions of other “public servants,” caught in the act of shredding, burning or erasing the telltale tracks of outrageous waste.
I’ve always heard that trust is something you earn. But when those “T” dollars are thrown around, without so much as a faint appreciation of the fact that it came to them by way of the sweat of your (and my) brow, to my way of thinking, the GSA and their ilk have yet to earn even one red cent’s worth.
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