Budget Humor

The latest budget proposal seems to elicit a vein of humorous commentary.  I succumbed to it earlier, and now blogger Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post waxes satirical on the subject too.

Achenbach's essay does provoke a chuckle or two.  And I especially like that he's raised the issue of what a deficit dollar now means in the future. 

One aspect of that, which makes me less frantic about the deficit than most people, is that a borrowed dollar is a constant, paid back in future years with a dollar that's worth less than a dollar thanks to inflation. 

After all, isn't it like paying off a 30-year mortgage? -- at first the payments seem immense, but there comes a point where your rising income, as you progress from age 30 to age 60, makes that mortgage payment seem ever smaller. 

So I figure that as the economy recovers, the debt is not going to be nearly as difficult to pay off as everyone thinks it is now.   I really don't think we want to wait for years until we can "afford" it with money we now have in the Treasury, because thanks to Congress, we will never have any in the Treasury. 

The latest budget proposal seems to elicit a vein of humorous commentary.  I succumbed to it earlier, and now blogger Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post waxes satirical on the subject too.

Achenbach's essay does provoke a chuckle or two.  And I especially like that he's raised the issue of what a deficit dollar now means in the future. 

One aspect of that, which makes me less frantic about the deficit than most people, is that a borrowed dollar is a constant, paid back in future years with a dollar that's worth less than a dollar thanks to inflation. 

After all, isn't it like paying off a 30-year mortgage? -- at first the payments seem immense, but there comes a point where your rising income, as you progress from age 30 to age 60, makes that mortgage payment seem ever smaller. 

So I figure that as the economy recovers, the debt is not going to be nearly as difficult to pay off as everyone thinks it is now.   I really don't think we want to wait for years until we can "afford" it with money we now have in the Treasury, because thanks to Congress, we will never have any in the Treasury.