THE YAWNING GRIN!

By Edwin Cooney

“It ain’t easy,” as they say, it may strain the muscles in one’s face a bit, but grinning can really be done while yawning! I did it as I recently read a commentary on the significance of our national debt.

Of course, politicians of both parties are really worried about it. They’re even making it a top political priority issue in the upcoming presidential and congressional campaigns -- as though it has never before been an issue.

I was recently sent an email that “splains” it all in very simple terms. This email commentary uses the family budget to put into perspective our national debt. Families, we’re reminded just in case we didn’t realize it, have to pay off their indebtedness or they go bankrupt. Thus, they insist, it is the same with nations.

What the authors of pieces like the one I received don’t tell you is that families, despite all of the political metaphors politicians pedal to us, will never spend money the way a great and truly progressive nation is obligated to spend.

Families are primarily consumers. Their money is spent on food, shelter, medical needs, education and entertainment.

National incomes are invested in their citizens’ education, on military preparedness, scientific and medical research, the construction of roads, bridges and highways, and so on. Nations establish institutions and structures such as the national weather service, the center for disease control, dams, and national parks to ensure national security. Each of these investments supports a nation’s families by securing and assuring their education, recreation, employment and ongoing safety.

If dad and mom spend a bundle on their son’s education and Sonny makes a lot of money, it’s likely they may be reimbursed or, even more, rewarded, out of loving gratitude. However, if Sonny holds a lot of resentment toward dad and mom, he doesn’t have to do a thing regarding repayment (that is, unless his parents “loaned” him the money and, even then, unless he contracted to pay the “loan,” there’s no legal obligation on Sonny’s part to reimburse “dear old dad and mom.”)

Now, we have two opposing ideologies alive and kicking today. One ideology says that anything that happens to people is their own business and, subsequently, their own responsibility. The other ideology insists that we’re all “family” and are better off if we acknowledge and sustain that obligation to one another. The truth is that to subscribers of the first ideology, unless you’re lucratively employed (or looking for work), follow the major tenants of a mainstream religion, support supply-side economics, endorse the policy of American domination in 21st Century world affairs, and revere the memory of Ronald Reagan, you’re not really family. This set of conclusions causes me to yawn.

The grin on my physiognomy is born out of the fact that ever since FDR, Republicans have promised that whatever we may think of their foreign policies, the fact that many of them are entrepreneurs and heads of households makes them solid fiscal managers who will never lead us into debt.

I know, you’re getting the impression that I don’t take GOP concerns seriously enough! Part of the reason for that is that I’m confused. Didn’t Vice President Dick Chaney tell President George W. Bush’s outgoing Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in January 2004 that Ronald Reagan had proven that national debts don’t really matter?

On January 20th, 1981, Jimmy Carter left our new president, Ronald Wilson Reagan, with a debt of about a trillion dollars. On January 20th, 1989, Ronald Reagan left our next new President George H. W. Bush with a national deficit of three trillion dollars. Thus, the whole topic of our national indebtedness is too often camouflaged by political partisanship

Like death and disease, monetary debt is most lethal when it’s personal. The sad truth is that families go broke only because we can afford to allow some of them to go broke. I believe that America won’t go broke because, in the end, we just can’t afford it! (Whoops, I’m grinning again)!

There’s already reasonably reliable speculation among economic/political observers that Conservatives want to maintain a good chunk of their tax cuts which will run out at the end of the year and Liberals, who insist on keeping viable some of our entitlements, will compromise after November 6th with whoever is president. Why will they settle? They’ll settle because they must! It’s okay, go ahead and yawn!

Ah! The simultaneous yawn and grin! It’s almost (although not quite) as hard to pull off as the task of paying the national debt. Believe me, it’s way beyond a mere family matter!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY