Collective excess....

Not everybody believes the economy is doing well.
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Collective excess will have to be paid for
By MARK TRAHANT SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
December 4, 2005 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/250620_trahant04.html

.........What about the nation's debt load, both personal and governmental? How are we going to pay for what we owe?
I hear from many readers who share similar concerns.

Dick Schwartz from Bellevue wrote last week: "Please find a copy of a letter I recently sent to every person in my address book." His five-page letter details concerns ranging from overwhelming individual credit card debt to how we as a nation allocate our resources -- especially the defense budget.

"Overkill is too mild a word for this distortion of our priorities," Schwartz writes. "In the long run, does our country really benefit more from this excessive 'defense' spending than it would if we re-shifted some of these resources to rebuilding our badly deteriorated national infrastructure to produce better educated citizens? The situation is analogous to a person who earns $50,000 a year spending $30,000 a year of it on burglar alarms."

Consider our "global war on terror." Even as the war -- mostly Iraq -- consumes billions of dollars, we continue to spend money and resources defending threats from previous eras. The Star Wars missile defense program is a case in point.

"Annual missile defense budgets increased by more than 80 percent in the first two years of the Bush administration, from $4.2 billion per year to $7.7 billion per year. Budgets have continued to increase, to $8.8 billion in the proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2006, down from $9.9 billion in FY 2005," writes William Hartung of the World Policy Institute in a report released last month. "As budgets have increased, scrutiny of the missile program has diminished. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a long-time ally of the missile defense lobby, has eliminated basic reports on the costs and performance of the missile defense technology." Instead of choosing between the "global war on terror" and the missile shield, we borrow more money to do both.

We, the consumers, are no better than our government.

The Commerce Department reported in its quarterly GDP report that "personal consumption expenditures" increased to 4.2 percent (from 2.7 percent just three years ago). That must mean we are all earning that much more, right? Not exactly. Our personal disposable income isn't growing nearly as fast as our spending. Indeed, we had to borrow $531 billion from the rest of the world so we can afford to keep spending.

national credit limit is maxed,but of course there is no limit.The dirty little secret no one wants to deal with.One day we will wake up and the headline will read country is broke how did this happen?Everyone will scatch their heads and wonder why no one ever said anything.