New rule: if you don’t understand the difference between the federal budget deficit and the national debt, you are not allowed to have a checking account or a credit card. Look, Daddy left 5 years ago with the Corvette he put on a credit card, and he also left mommy to take care of us kids AND pay for that car every month. Does that help explain it?
Republicans love to parade the ballooning debt in front of us in graph memes as a dramatic statement of Obama’s failure, rather than placing the responsibility on the guy who financed the wars – er, Corvette – in the first place.
Democrats, for their part, aren’t helping. The Corvette is down the road. And we have to pay for it. Whining about Daddy, in the end, doesn’t help, but neither does the Democrats’ latest strategy: praising Obama in a counter-meme with a graph about how the debt is going down. That’s great. We’re paying our bills and we’re still not solvent. We have too much credit card debt and we're still using our credit card for groceries, but we’re making the minimum payment every month. Super. *Golf clap*
Here's the real problem: this is one of those nuanced issues that Americans aren’t grasping because both parties are stomping around with their pet graph as proof positive that they are right, rather than looking at the larger issue: our budget sucks and the process of making it is a joke. Until we are able to see through this crapstorm, we will continue to be baffled by the bull our elected officials throw at us, claiming they are right and the other side is wrong.
We love Daddy and we love Mommy, but let’s face it, in this analogy, they’re not just spending our inheritance to buy a car they can’t afford – they are spending our ACTUAL MONEY.