It’s Nothing Like A Credit Card!

17 October, 2013. 446 words.

I was watching C-SPAN last night and saw Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaking about the debt ceiling and whatnot … you know, politician stuff. That’s not the point. The point is he stumbled into a pet peeve of mine. He was describing the debt ceiling and what it means to raise it. Naturally he went to the go-to analogy that everyone uses when discussing the debt ceiling: It’s like paying your mortgage with your credit card. Or something like that. I can’t remember the exact analogy, but that’s not the point. The point is that he did what every politician does, which is to try to equate the operation of the federal government with the operation of an average family household.

Okay. Okay. Let me see if I can say this without my head exploding too much. The finances of the entire federal government in no way resembles the finances of your household or your checkbook. Let’s see if I can come up with some of my own analogies. Your household is like snapping together a couple of lego blocks, whereas the federal government is like building the Taj Mahal. Your household is like driving to the grocery store, whereas the federal government is like building a rocket to go to Mars and back. The point is that running the finances of your household is nowhere near as complicated as the federal government.

Now on the surface of things, I would agree that continually raising the national debt ceiling is probably not a great idea. It’s like raising your credit limit so you can buy more stuff, right? … … No! It’s nothing like that! It’s way, way more complicated than that. It’d be more like promising to pay someone for something, then using your credit card to pay for it because your paycheck doesn’t come in until next week, then paying off your credit card bill, then promising to pay someone else for something else, but that something else is more expensive than what you promised someone else you would spend, so you ask that someone else if it’s okay, and that someone else says sure that’s fine, then you go ahead and pay the first someone else with your credit card, then you pay off your credit card bill again. It’s like that but with about 50 million different someones. That’s more like what it really is. Assuming I even understand a tenth of what I think I understand about the debt ceiling, which is a dubious claim at best.

So politicians, pundits, and whoever else: Please stop comparing the federal government’s finances to our checkbooks. It’s wrong, and incredibly insulting to our intelligence.

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