Get Out of My Wallet

$825 billion.

It’s staggering to imagine a number that high. The value is so large, that typing it out as $825,000,000,000 is too long for most printed articles, so we see it shortened into words. What other kind of everyday number creates that necessity? Think about “four”. Think about “twenty-two”. Nope – it’s far easier to type “4” or “22” than to write out the words – at least for numbers that have some meaning to the average person.

$825 billion is the amount the government is proposing for the next wave of bailout money. Add this to the $700 billion that seems to have been wasted in the first round. And add it, also, to the $1.2 trillion budget deficit that is forecast to occur this coming year. I’m going to ignore for the moment my revulsion for the leaders in Congress who truly think I will believe the idea that more government intervention is the answer to our economic woes. And I’ll set aside any arguments that I’m tempted to make about government waste and worthless spending programs – dropping billions on programs that not only are unconstitutional, but to which I am morally opposed. No, instead I want to think about one question – where does the government get $825 billion, anyway?

Three ideas come to mind. The first is that they got it from you and me, the American taxpayers. Governments are funded primarily by taxes, so to some degree, the source of this money came out of the pockets of every working American. Indeed, $275 billion of the total program is supposed to take the form of “temporary tax benefits” over the next two years. To me, this seems the same as if the government said, “Oops, we might have been taking too much money from you in taxes previously and it’s stifled your spending, so here – have some of it back.” And I have no illusions that the $275 billion that comes back started out as significantly more than that amount. The federal government isn’t known for being terribly efficient with our money.

The second place they could get such a staggering amount of money is that the government can borrow it from foreign nations. And they do. And it furthers a mounting debt obligation to those nations, putting the United States into a worsening position of weakness on the foreign markets. Will moves like this put the Chinese yuan into the position once enjoyed by the US dollar? However you view it, a foreign debt of this size weakens America in the long-term, regardless of the importance of fixing the problem right away.

The third place that our government could obtain this money is to get it the old-fashioned way – they print it. Our currency is no longer pegged to a gold standard, so the feds could print $825 billion in a matter of days if they wanted to. They could return some of those green bills to the taxpayer, and still go out and commission the construction of some new roads and bridges. But inflation would be the result – meaning that the money they send back to us would be worth significantly less than when they took it from us in the first place. Hey, government, what did you do with my money?

It’s time to stand up and say, “No more”. Government intervention has repeatedly caused economic downturns in the past. It’s the problem, not the solution. Let’s face it – would you trust the federal government to step in and run a private business more efficiently than the entrepreneurs who started it? Would Washington make a better (and less expensive) iPod every two years? Do we really think the feds will do a better job of overseeing innovations in automobiles than the free market can do?

A fourth source of the $825 billion just occurred to me – the government could steal it. But on second thought, that’s really not any different than the first source…

Offering Meditation - What’s In Your Garbage Bag?

What am I truly invested in? What measure do I use to determine what is really important to me? It could be the time I invest in things, or the effort that I expend toward achieving a task. Or it could be the fervor with which I discuss a subject with a friend. I get up early in the morning on Saturday to do things that I deem to be especially important.

I still find myself checking bank accounts, stock prices, and financial investments sometimes in order get an estimation of my worth in this world. Sometimes, that actually gives me a measure of comfort, though it is usually short-lived.

Recently, I asked my family to do something a little different. I hung a clear plastic garbage bag outside the door in the garage and asked them to put every receipt for every purchase we made in the bag, until I was ready to use the bag for something special. To tell the truth, I knew that I would have an offering meditation to do at church in the future, and I had an idea that saving these receipts would provide some interesting subject matter. For about three months, we saved our receipts faithfully until I pulled the bag off the wall one day.

There was a time when filling that bag with receipts would have made me a little proud. It was a measure of what I could afford, which was a proxy for some degree of financial status. But now, it made me a little sad to see that my efforts to earn a paycheck and provide for my family in a financial way could be represented by a garbage bag full of bits of paper.

When we opened the bag, I had the family just take some time to go through the receipts and recall some of the things that we thought were important at the time. Curiously, almost all of the items listed in the bag are consumable – those things are now gone. I also noticed that our family eats quite a lot of cheese.

Getting older has woken me to the fact that there is much more to the life than the present moment. I think having children was the start of that journey. Tucking them in at night and watching them sleep when they were little, and wondering what they would become and how I could contribute to that outcome has a sobering effect. It makes it easier to invest in things other than bank accounts or retirement funds. Things like education, choosing friends, or getting involved in people’s lives take on new meaning when an eternal perspective is involved.

Matthew 6:19-21 says “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Heaven is what lasts, and it’s where I want to spend eternity with my wife, my children, and everyone else whom the Lord deems to enter there. Bringing that eternal point-of-view in focus against the window-dressing of this world has a life-changing effect.

After all, when you get to the end of your days, do you really want to be the one to say, “Hey, I had the biggest garbage bag?”