The more I rant about the debt, the more e-mails I get like this one from Tammy in Florida, who writes...
"Will you 'ever' shut up about that damn debt clock?!! My god, you never give up!! It's getting old. Give us something new..."
Tammy, how about this... Since last night when you wrote that... We're four billion dollars "more" in debt.
Then there's this from Max out in L.A....
"You act as if all this just happened and all this is Obama's fault... I never heard you say a word when your buddy bush was bailing out the banks and starting this mess."
Then you heard wrong, Max. On this show... And on my Fox Business show... Which if you don't get, you really should demand...
Repeatedly blasted those bailouts... Arguing they were setting a bad and dangerous precedent... Even when it got a very chilly response from my so-called buddy Bush's administration... And many others supporting what he was doing...
Point then, as it is now... "green."
Not red.
Not blue.
Green. Your green. Your money.
Because for me, this "isn't" business.
It's personal.
Personally know what debt can do.
You see, a couple of decades ago, I got very sick. I had cancer, and it looked like I was gonna die.
And to make things worse... I had bills. And I had insurance companies that disputed paying those bills.
We can get into another discussion about the flaws of the healthcare system... And why I feel this president's fix... Hasn't fixed the flaws in that system. But not now... Back to this...
Back to how I frantically paid those bills any way I could. Tapping Visa credit lines. MasterCard lines. Often paying one off the other... Always juggling, forever drowning...
Here's how bad things got for me...
It got to the point where, just paying the minimum on all those credit card bills and home equity loans was my single biggest expense.
I used to tell my wife then, "If the chemo doesn't kill me, the lack of cash to pay for it will."
I don't know what scared me more back then. Dying. Or dying in debt.
Well, as you can see, I didn't die. I beat that cancer. Unfortunately I got another bad disease after that... But back to this...
I remember all that as if it were only yesterday...
And I see it all happening in our country again today.
Sicker than I ever was... Times, like a gazillion!!
We pay almost 240 billion dollars a year in interest payments on a 16-trillion dollar debt.
That's just our national finance charges... Not a penny of it going to paying off that debt.
And that's with interest rates really low... Could you imagine if they go really high?
I remember such a time. Do our politicians?
I remember the panic of drowning in debt.
I also remember, like my financial pal Dave Ramsey, the freedom when I no longer was. When I could breathe. When I could... Live.
When money I used to give to Visa or MasterCard... I could give... To me... To a family vacation... Or my long financially suffering wife.
Imagine that happening to our country.
Imagine actually having the money to strategically invest in this country.
Imagine what we could do with that 240 billion we're throwing away in interest payments each year in this country?
Because with apologies to Joe Biden, you want to know the "real" chains and shackles in life?
The debt you pile on... We pile on... In life.
...the financial chains that prevent us from simply "living" our lives.
Take it from someone who's been there.
When you have no cash, you have no clout.
When you're out of money, you're out of options.
Because you can't strategically invest squat.
And right now, that's all we've got... Squat. Nothing. Nada. Zippo.
After all this spending, we're just... Spent.
That's what happens when you owe.
You have nowhere to go.
But... When you "don't" owe, there is nowhere you "can't" go.
That's why I'm crazy about this.
I've lived this.
And I want to make damn sure, as a country and for our kids... We end this.
Once. And. For. All.
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