It was sometime around five years ago when I was performing my normal morning routine. Having the morning shift at the Subway restaurant, I had arrived 30 minutes early providing me the perfect opportunity to enjoy the cool morning breeze, warmth from a rising sun, and a gorgeous blue sky. As I was standing there waiting, I noticed a lady approach a nearby newspaper machine. She was a tall blond I had worked with a year earlier. I watched as she put the quarters in the machine, pressed a button, and pulled on the door. The door, however, did not open. She then pulled the coins out of the machine, put them back in, pushed a button, and pulled on the door…which, once again did not open. I watched as this process repeated itself at least a dozen times. Feeling bad for her, curious of what wasn’t working, and slightly frustrated that my moment of solitude was being interrupted I approached her. We said our hello’s as she continued the process and then I offered to try for her. She handed me the quarters and I in turn placed them in the machine. It is human nature that when we attempt to accomplish something that we try to accomplish it the way we see everyone else trying to accomplish it. And so, that is what I did. I inserted the quarters into the machine and then, following what I had observed, I reached to press the button she had been pressing all along when I noticed the words above the button read, “Coin Return”. You can imagine my predicament. My only way of helping her get her newspaper was to point out her inability to follow the basic common sense and logical reasoning skills that would have led to reading those words. Either that, or pretend to be just as dumb as we both walk away no one having gotten a paper that day.
This is, unfortunately, the state of our nation and society. Insanity is defined as repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Our nation is in debt. It’s states are in debt. Our families are in debt. And why? Our families are spending more than they make. Our states are spending more than they bring in taxes. Our federal government spends more than it makes in taxation. The one thing Republicans, Democrats, and independents can all agree on is that spending is too high while income is too low. They just can’t seem to agree on how to fix it. Democrats keep increasing spending and taxation with the promise that the more money they take away from us, the more they can spend, and the more they spend, the more we will in turn have for them to take to re-spend. We all know that hasn’t been working out for us, but we continue doing it. How many bail outs have we given with no economic improvement? How many debt limit increases will we be put in place before we see even a remote improvement in our economy? We are giving billions to other nations for their economic growth all the while our own economy is taking a dip at such degrees we’ll be no better off than them in a few decades.
What family has ever spent beyond its means to find themselves rich because of it? When you spend beyond your means, you are spending money that doesn’t exist. You reap what you sow. If you sow money that doesn’t exist what you reap will not exist. Nothing can be strong on a non-existent foundation. It’s like trying to buy a pizza oven to cut spending. The right solution is to stop spending money on pizza, not buy an oven that will result in you spending more and more money on ingredients to continue eating pizza which you can’t afford. We could blame the politicians for being insane by repeating the same cycle of over spending and expecting a different result rather than actually finding a solution. However, are we the people not also insane for repeating the cycle of electing the same politicians over and over and expecting them to run the country differently? This time around, let’s not re-elect the over spenders.