If you are anything like me, there are some words and ideas that cause immediate glaze and trance: hermeneutics, tax code, parliamentary procedure, Thomas Aquinas, and Patrick White, for example.
But the greatest of these doze-inducers are the magic words The National Debt. I have seen people at a dinner table plop their faces into their pastas when these words are uttered; I have seen savage dogs instantly rendered insensate; I have whispered brawling children to sleep by briefly examining the national debt and its implications.
Yet this morning I inflict the words debt and deficit upon you, because even I, a simpleton in economic and financial matters, have begun to be quietly terrified and angry about my country's financial status, and not for political reasons as much as parental.
Of late I begin to think my country is stealing nakedly from its children, beggaring its grandchildren, and essentially selling what was one of the greatest national ideas in human history to China.
An unnerving state of affairs.
Here are some handles on it. The United States' national debt — the money we owe — is $14 trillion, the biggest outstanding bill in American history. Our biggest creditor is China. My personal share of that debt, were we to pawn it off on each citizen of any age and stage, is $46,000, far more than half my annual income. The budget deficit — the hole between income and outgo — is $1.5 trillion.
The proposal being debated in my national capitol, the one that probably will pass into law, will allow us to borrow more money, so that our deficit will creep past $1.5 trillion, even as we raise a few taxes, cut an enormous number of public services, hope desperately for a business boom, and blame each other for the mess in ever more vituperative terms.
It's a crazy number, 1.5 trillion — 1,500,000,000,000; pinball numbers, as we say in the States. And how very easy it is to ignore the matter, hope it will all work out, trust our elected representatives to right the ship, entertain the idea of learning Chinese, and trundle along trying to manage the smaller unwieldy corporation that is the family unit, with its two minor incomes, vast mortgage, and economically useless teenagers, not to mention the dog, who has never earned a penny as yet.
But I cannot do that, because the cold logic of it all is clear to me. When I borrow more than I earn, I am in deficit. I have debt, or debt has me. If I borrow more to address the deficit, I have more debt. Eventually I can borrow no more. Yet debt still has me, and a huge debt, too.
Unless something miraculous happens, soon I have no house, no car, a lien on my earnings the rest of my life, no money for the kids to go to college, no money for when I am old and broken, and the hope only that I can lean on friends, family, and government for support, or write a novel so lewd and foolish that it is instantly made into a major feature film.
But imagine it is the government itself drowning in debt. If one country owes another a vast amount of money, can the first threaten the second with force if the second, for example, invades its neighbors? If you have no money as a nation, how do you pay your soldiers and sailors and airmen? How do you invest in education to foment creativity to spark new and lucrative businesses? How do you clean your air and water for your children? How do you come to the aid of your allies, like, say, Australia, if China decides to suddenly nationalise Australia's mining industry?
And how would a dad, wide awake in the nether reaches of the night, explain to his children that they are saddled with national liens on their earnings for the next 50 years, and that probably they will not want to have many or any children themselves, for children in the future may be useful mostly as tax production units, paying off the debt incurred in the opening years of the 21st century?
The essential idea at the heart of the American experiment, both when it started and unto today, is that you are free to do what you please, within the bounds of civility and safety.
For all that we argue constantly about what this means, for all that we fought against the imperial, fascist, and communist powers that would happily have kept or placed us in thrall, for all our fears of a murderous Yemeni thug and his fellow conspirators who would foment a war between East and West, it seems to me that America now teeters on the edge of a darker future than we have imagined since Hitler's fever dreams of an Aryan world served by slaves of every color and creed.
We cannot continue in this fashion, or we will enslave our own children and grandchildren to ruinous debt for the terms of their natural lives; we will twist their lives in unimaginable ways, because we would not pay our bills or reduce the airy luxury with which we lived.
We talk freely about personal sins; we quietly consider the Germans to have collectively committed a national sin in the last century, at least of omission; how sad that America might be remembered as the nation to have committed a sin of commission against its own beloved children.
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland.