photo #9431527

The Federalist Papers When I was growing up, I assumed the people running Washington were the smartest people in the country.Top schools. Fancy titles. Big offices. Surely they knew what they were doing.How wrong we were.Turns out, it's a clown show. And the proof is the $40 trillion debt hanging over every American family.Here's what drives me crazy. The fix isn't complicated. It isn't some secret formula only economists understand.Spend less than you take in.That's it. A second grader can figure it out, which is exactly the point of this cartoon.Every family in America lives by that rule. If you bring home $5,000 a month, you don't spend $6,500 and put the rest on a credit card forever. Eventually the bank comes calling. So you cut back. You skip the vacation. You make hard choices.Washington never makes hard choices.Instead, they spend money they don't have on programs nobody asked for. They send checks to people who aren't eligible. They lose billions to fraud and shrug it off as the cost of doing business.Then they turn around and tell us the budget is so complicated that regular folks couldn't possibly understand it.We understand it just fine.Cut the nonsense. Cut the fraud. Cut the waste. Stop treating the taxpayer like a bottomless ATM.Do that, live within our means, and the debt finally starts coming down.The problem isn't that the answer is hard. The problem is that the people in charge don't want to hear it. Every dollar they spend buys them a vote, a donor, or a headline.So the little girl in the cartoon gets it, and the man in the suit doesn't.That tells you everything you need to know about Washington.Every family knows you can't spend more than you make. Why can't Washington figure it out?