A million dollars a minute

The Washington Times ^ | February 14, 2018 | Andrew P. Napolitano

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back.

Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back more than $6 trillion. So you borrow $6 trillion to pay back the $6 trillion you owe.

Is this unending spigot of cash reality or fantasy?

I am not speaking of Amazon or Google or Exxon Mobil or Apple. They deliver products that appeal to consumers and investors. They deal in copious amounts of money because they sell what hundreds of millions of people want to purchase and they do it so efficiently that hundreds of thousands want to invest in them. If they fail to persuade consumers to purchase their products and investors to purchase their financial instruments, they will go out of business.

My analogy about all that cash in your kitchen sink that just keeps coming is not about voluntary commercial transactions, which you are free to accept or reject. It is about the government’s spending what it doesn’t have, the consequences of which you are not free to reject.

[Wolfie]

Wow, the judge should send that analogy to Congress. I’m sure they’d straighten up an fly right after that.

[4Liberty]

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Nah, they would probably double down.

[kearnyirish2]

“It is about the government’s spending what it doesn’t have, the consequences of which you are not free to reject.”

This would be much more important if more American taxpayers were breeding; the “mortgaging of our grandchildren’s future” will impact other groups much more, as they’ll have little help footing the bill. Too many Americans have determined they’d rather remove their genes from this planet when they expire rather than produce a next generation, so much of the thinking is short-term. The news story within the past year that pointed out how many European leaders were childless went a long way towards explaining their indifference to the Muslim invasion of their home countries.