Don’t fret, we’re all in debt!

The title of this piece is taken from a bumper sticker that was issued by the Production Credit Association back in the early 1980s. PCAs are part of the national Farm Credit System that was originally set up in 1916 by the federal government to provide capital for farming. At that time, long-term loans for buying farm land were virtually non-existent.

PCAs, as their name implies, were intended to supply medium and short-term credit to finance actual production. In my years of farming (1976-1992), I used the local PCA to borrow money not only to finance equipment purchases, but also to buy seed, fertilizer and fuel to actually plant the crops.

The theory was that when the crops were harvested there would be enough money left over to pay off the production loan, a theory that was not always proved true in the depressed agricultural market of the 80s. Throughout the 1980s I was just one natural disaster away from ruin, but the PCA kept me afloat until the horrible weather of 1992 mercifully ended my farming career.

The bumper sticker was apparently intended to tell borrowers not to worry about all that. A secondary meaning, of course, was that as citizens and taxpayers we are all indebted through our various levels of government. Ironically, in the early 1980s our national debt was only about $1 trillion or about $4,200 per man, woman and child alive at that time.

It seemed like a lot then, but in 1980 our debt was actually at a proportional 50-year-low at less than 40 percentage of our Gross National Product. Today, with new bailouts seeming to grow our debt by a trillion dollars a day, we are returning to New Deal era levels of national debt upwards of 90% of our GNP. While our population has grown to 300 million, our current national debt of 10 trillion has soared to something over $33,000 per person at last count.

Even so, collectively, the government is doing better than our individual households who are reported to be in debt at a rate approaching 120% of household income. Are you there yet? Add up the balance on your mortgage, car loans, credit cards and miscellaneous loans for home improvement, education, debt consolidation or whatever. Do you make that much a year. I sure don’t!

When looking for the villain in the Great National Debt Unwinding currently playing at a financial institution near you, we all might want to start by looking in the mirror. As that great philosopher Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

Astrologically speaking

I’m enough of a child of the 1960s to have imbibed a fair amount of astrological theory and I’ve always found it to be helpful in explaining the operation of the real world. I am not referring to the silly horoscopes that run in the daily paper, nor do I go for extensive over-analysis, such as calculating what house the planet Neptune was in at the moment of birth.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I have found that people born under the same sun sign do seem to have common personality traits, much more often than random chance would suggest. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.

For instance, I am a Sagittarius (The Archer), and as most people who study the subject know, Sagittarians were put on this earth for only one purpose: to drive everybody else crazy! I rest my case.

For the past few months, the blogosphere has been filled with rumors about where Barack Obama was actually born and whether he is even an American citizen and eligible to serve as our next President. (Fellow Presidential candidate Alan Keyes recently filed a lawsuit over it.) Although Obama’s place of birth may be in dispute, no one (as far as I know) has yet disputed his birth date of August 4, 1961.

Personally, I am less concerned about his citizenship, or any of his other questionable associations, than I am about his membership in the House of Leo. I don’t want to speak ill of my fellow fire signs, Leo (The Lion) can be a great friend and a boon companion. If members of that sign bear a common failing, however, it is that they seem to believe that the sun rises just for them every day.

According to Wikipedia, here are a few of the other negatives traits that are sometimes found in the Leo personality: loves attention, bossy, dogmatic and argumentative. These can best be summed up as a tendency toward arrogance, that I think has long been on display in our President-elect.

To start with, how many people do you know who at age 47 have already written two autobiographies? The title of Obama’s second version even includes the word “Audacity”, which in my view, pretty well sums up his personality. Of course, the Jewish people have another word for that, “Chutzpah”, and it is not necessarily a bad thing for a politician to have a little of it, but I worry.

I say this, not to take a cheap shot at our next leader, but for all our sakes. As a member of the Loyal Opposition, I sincerely hope he has a successful term in office. (But not so successful that he has a second term!)

I say this only to warn what we need to be on guard against. The unfortunate tendency of a Leo, when faced with a problem that they do not know how to deal with, is to try and bluff their way through. (Our last Leo President was Bill Clinton –need I say more?). This can sometimes work in your weekly poker game, but can be extremely dangerous when the fate of the world is at stake.

I worry that Mr. Obama, in order to make up for his acknowledged lack of foreign policy experience and his perceived weakness on defense, may go too far in the other direction. If he overreacts to try to prove his mettle he could turn what should be a minor conflict into a major conflagration.

Of course there is a wide variation among Leos. A few of the worst perhaps were Fidel Castro, Yassar Arafat, Benito Mussolini and Napoleon. (In fact, what is a Napoleon Complex but the Leo personality run amok?)

On the other hand, we’ve also have had some pretty wild Lions like Davey Crockett, Annie Oakley, Mick Jagger and Leo “The Lip” Durocher. It should be an interesting four years!