by James Glaser
March 11, 2004

Every month I try and spend just a little less than I take in. That doesn't always work and then I am doing some "deficit spending." There is a difference between my deficit spending and the federal governments. I am spending out of monies I have in reserve, which seems to be a smaller reserve every time I dip in to it. The federal government is borrowing the "extra" money they need and in big chunks.

The reason I thought about writing this is that I was at the bank and our small locally owned bank hands out your checking account statement when you come in to save the mailing costs. I asked if they would check my balance and surprise, it was way too high, by over a thousand dollars. I try and keep a balance in my mind and in my check book so I know where I'm at, but this number wasn't even close.

I got home and found the calculator and sat down and figured out where I thought I should be and was going to go back to town and see what the bank had to say. Then I realized that both of our figures put me in the Black, so there was no hurry and I could blow it off until tomorrow morning. Then I saw a headline in the paper about how our nation's trade deficit was $43.1 billion in the Red.

43 billion is a lot of money. I know we are the biggest economy in the world, but this was for just one month and it seems like every month we have a huge trade deficit. Last year we sold $490.8 billion less than we imported. This has been going on for years. Some leading economists will tell you that these deficits are good and then there are people like Warren Buffett, who says, "Our trade deficit has greatly worsened, to the point that our country's net worth so to speak, is now being transferred at an alarming rate."

I have to ask, how long can we keep this up? Some day at the rate we are going, everything we own will be in a foreign country. Yes, I know that many of our companies are overseas and that much of this trade is between American companies, but the ones overseas are not paying any taxes over here, nor are they providing any jobs.

Washington has made international trade so complicated with free trade agreements that are not really "free trade" and then there are the tariffs on some things and protection of others that most American's have no idea of what is good for the country and what is bad.

My mom and dad always stressed that when all else failed it was good to look at a common sense approach. It just seems rational to me that if each and every month our country comes out on the short end of trading with other countries to the tune of about 40 billion dollars, after several years we are going to be in real trouble. Remember, 40 billion dollars, is forty thousand little piles of money and each pile has one million dollars in it.

For years now we have as a country been losing that much money each and every month. Yes there are Americans making money off of this some how, but those Americans don't really give a rat's ass about the rest of us. If they are real rich they can suck our nation dry and move where ever they want to. No, I have no idea of who these people are, but I do know who works for these people and that is our government in Washington. It isn't just George Bush, but he is the most open about it. Washington is setting our country on a course where the rich get richer and the rest of us, if we are lucky, stay the same.

Washington knows that the people with the most money, all vote and the voting numbers do follow both wealth and education. The bottom one half of America could, in theory, take the country over, but it isn't going to happen. People with money, work real hard to keep it. They know where they have to spread it to make it grow and Washington is, right now the world's best place to spread it. Years from now these same people might be buying influence in India or China.

So next time you see your local politician, ask him his take on our trade deficit. If he agrees that it is bad or it is hurting our country, you will know that the guy is bullshitting you, because nobody in Washington is saying a thing about these deficits. Politicians will make the best guess they can on what they think you want to hear. They might switch their opinion on a subject several times a day.

I wish I had some answer about all of this, but I don't. It is kind of nice to know what is going on. Everyone keeps saying all this free trade is going to work to our advantage in the future, but you know what? I don't buy that. Sure at some future time America is going to have some great high tech jobs for some of our people, but you know what? We have millions of American citizens that are not even finishing high school.

We have millions of young people that can't read worth a damn and retail clerks in fast food restaurants have pictures instead of numbers on the cash register because they don't know how to count.

There are about 8,000 illegal aliens coming across the border with Mexico every night. These people have a hard time even speaking English and we have a group in Washington that is telling us not to worry because we will have bigger and better high tech jobs for everybody in a few years.

The people saying this have their heads up their asses. America is going to need millions and millions of low tech jobs for generations. The only way to change that is for our education system to change drastically and there is not a hint of that going on now.