Reply #18: Blind to the obvious -- by Mogambo Guru

[bemildred]

I was looking at how Treasury gross public debt is now officially over US$9.5 trillion, and was thinking of using that particular bit of terrifying insanity as an excuse to get really hammered, when I suddenly remembered that I didn't have any money or credit with which to buy inexpensive but tasty alcoholic beverages, or even a burrito to get that subtle taste of anti-freeze out of my mouth. Damn!

Recently, I had forged a lot of IOUs in my kids' names at various bars around town, and already people were getting suspicious about them, unduly limiting my subsequent issuances of more IOUs, and I was out of ideas for a new scam.

So it was somewhat coincidental and startling that at the very next moment I read where Gary North in his Reality Check newsletter at garynorth.com wrote, "Americans would regard the son's inheritance of a father's debt as tyrannical. But, with the help of Congress, Americans have adopted the same system, but on a far larger scale. We have passed our IOUs on to the children of our neighbors' children."

This brings up one of the points of disagreement between Mr North and me, as he thinks of these creditors as "neighbors", while I refer to them as "vicious foreign devils", and not just because I am a xenophobic, fearful, hateful, paranoid whack-job, but because every lynch mob I have ever seen in the movies or heard about in real life is always comprised of somebody's "neighbors".

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JG26Dj01.html