On Busting My Hump

When I got my first job flipping pizzas for the man, my old man co-signed a loan for my first automobile, a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle. The loan was for $500, an amount my 15-year-old mind could barely wrap itself around. As I slaved away at my $3.10 per hour job, that loan stood over my shoulder and breathed down my neck. "That's right, boy," it said, "You're working for me, now." I fortunately made it through the debtors' prison nightmares and eventually paid that loan off, and as a good American consumer, moved on to more expensive cars and larger and larger loans.

Now that I make millions and millions of dollars, that $500 loan seems quite amusing. Nowadays, I'll easily blow $500 in a weekend on bar tips and cigars down at the Copacabana. Because see, when you make three thousand dollars a year before taxes, a five hundred dollar loan is about twenty percent of your net income. If I make, say, a million dollars a year, I'd have to take out a $160,000 loan to be under the same debt strain.

The point is, it ain't the amount of debt you have, it's how much your debt is in relation to your income.

Take, for example, our national debt. The numbers are always staggering, but we have to look at them in comparison to the gross domestic product (GDP), which is like our national salary. Our debt amount could be increasing, but if we are keeping it in check with the growth of our GDP, then the debt strain is not increasing.

So take a wild guess who manages to consistently run up our national debt strain when in office. Surely it has to be those mad, free-spending liberals, right?

(P.S. The Bill Gates Wealth Index is a great illustration of the relative cost of things when income is factored in.)