America headed for bankruptcy

The U.S. Congress has failed to pass a budget for the past two years. You can use your own imagination to figure out why.
Even without a printed budget we can document the income and spending by our federal government.
The amounts are usually expressed in the trillions of dollars. Most of us cannot visualize or comprehend what those amounts actually mean. So here is a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms.
Let’s put the 2011 federal spending into perspective:
u Federal income: $2,170,000,000,000
u Federal spending: $3,820,000,000,000
u New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
u Current national debt: $14,271,000,000,000
u Recent budget cut:
$38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of total spending). It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let’s remove eight zeros from these amounts and apply this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.
u Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
u Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
u Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
u Current balance on the credit card: $142,710
u Amount cut from their budget: $385
So, in effect, last month Congress, or in this example the Jones family, sat down at the kitchen table and agreed to cut $385 from its annual budget.
What family would cut $385 of spending to solve $16,500 in deficit spending? Unless changes are made the Jones family is headed for bankruptcy in a couple of years.
It doesn’t take a Harvard economics professor to figure out the federal government is headed for bankruptcy as well. You and I can see that.
The question is: Is there any hope that changes can be made before this happens? Seeing how difficult it was to get the federal government to cut $385 billion from its spending I would have to say not much.
There is a group of tea party lawmakers who were brave enough to stand up and tell the truth about how much money the federal government has to spend.
They were told to “go to hell” by Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
They were effectively called “terrorists” by Vice President Joe Biden when he said, “they are acting like terrorists.”
Our own president effectively called them criminals by comparing them to criminals, who hold people hostage. Such harsh language does not bode well for changes that need to be made.
All this spending is going into someone’s pocket and/or giving politicians a lot of power. Who would want to give that up? It doesn’t matter to them that it will all end in a few years. Let the good times roll. Let the children of today and tomorrow live with the bankruptcy when it happens. I will be long gone.
The young people (age 18-30) helped elect Obama president in 2008.
Isn’t it ironic Obama is now selling out their future.

Robert Mungo is a Lancaster County resident.