Ray Stevens explains government spending best

By Randa Wagner –

With all the recent talk of the ‘fis­cal cliff’ and the immi­nent dan­ger of the finan­cial sys­tem ‘falling over the edge,’ it leaves many Amer­i­cans won­der­ing how we got to to this point.

The government’s bud­get and your family’s bud­get shouldn’t oper­ate dif­fer­ently, but they do. The old “don’t spend more than you take in’ prin­ci­ple is the com­mon sense approach to a suc­cess­ful bud­get plan. But peo­ple, in gen­eral, and the gov­ern­ment usu­ally want more than they can afford — and that’s how money prob­lems begin.

Come­dian Ray Stevens recently made a video (avail­able to view on YouTube) called “Obama Bud­get Plan.” It com­bines com­edy with some very sad truths about gov­ern­ment spend­ing. If you don’t have time to watch it, here are the lyrics to read and pon­der on:

Well, I told my wife we had to get con­trol of the finances in our household,

we had to sit down and make a bud­get we could live by.

I said, “We’ll list our income and all our bills -

get the bills, honey, if you will.”

and she got them and stacked them on the table three piles high!

Now I work two jobs and the wife cleans homes,

and our daugh­ter babysits and the son mows lawns,

but that bud­get wouldn’t bal­ance, no mat­ter how we tried.

So I said, “Let’s do what the gov­ern­ment does–

It works for them — it might work for us!”

So I for­got my ethics and morals and and swal­lowed my pride.…

We took out every credit card we could get

and loaded them up with the max­i­mum debt

and bor­rowed from friends and fam­ily and even took out loans overseas!

I bor­rowed at work, had credit at the store,

‘til folks just wouldn’t give us credit anymore.

and I said, “Honey, the next step is clear to me.…”

Cho­rus:

Cause we’ve got money, Obama money!

Yeah, we’re print­ing it in the base­ment just as fast as we can

We’re mak­ing money! Obama money!

Yeah, we’re liv­ing the ‘Obama bud­get plan.’

Well, we didn’t use the money to reduce our debt

There was a whole bunch of things we still wanted to get,

now that we had more money than ever before.

So, we built a deck and a patio,

put in a pool, bought a sec­ond home

took all the friends on a vaca­tion to Costa del Sol!

Final Cho­rus:

Cause we’ve got money, Obama money!

Yeah, we’re print­ing it in the base­ment just as fast as we can

We’re mak­ing money! Obama money!

Yeah, we’re liv­ing the ‘Obama bud­get plan.’

Bud­get ceil­ing? Credit score? Don’t worry ‘bout that — I’ll just print more!

Cause we’ve got money, Obama money!

Hey, honey, make a run to Office Depot — I need more paper!

Hurry back — I’ve got to pick up my new Cadil­lac this afternoon -

and I’m print­ing you up a lit­tle sur­prise birth­day stim­u­lus pack­age, too! Heh heh heh…

Boy, I sure hope them ‘spoil sport’ Repub­li­cans and Tea Party folks don’t screw this up…

once you renounce every sense of decency, it gets eas­ier and easier!

You know, I think I’ll just buy Board­walk AND Park Place — hey! I won­der how much they want for that Gen­eral Motors com­pany? ha ha.….

The video ends show­ing a news­pa­per head­line of “Fam­ily owes tril­lions to gov­ern­ment’ with a photo of the fam­ily behind bars.

I didn’t post this piece to pick on the pres­i­dent. One man isn’t solely respon­si­ble for a mess this big. The gov­ern­ment has been spend­ing far beyond their means for many years. The prob­lem is the debt is so large now, it grows expo­nen­tially at an accel­er­ated rate, and there’s just no way to reign it in any­time soon (i.e. the next 30 years). Add the not-so-bright idea of imple­ment­ing QE3 in late Sep­tem­ber of this year, and you have a toxic eco­nomic cock­tail Amer­i­cans will have hard time swallowing.

QE3 was intended to stim­u­late the econ­omy by mak­ing it cheaper for con­sumers and busi­nesses to bor­row and spend. Spend­ing $40 bil­lion a month to buy mort­gage bonds for ‘as long as what the gov­ern­ment deems nec­es­sary’ wouldn’t seem so insane if the money weren’t being pulled out of thin air. News reports tell us the Fed­eral Reserve is lit­er­ally print­ing the money with­out an ounce of gold to back it, but since each dol­lar wouldn’t be worth more than the paper and ink it con­sists of, it’s more effi­cient to just trans­fer non-existant funds elec­tron­i­cally. Stim­u­lus money came from the same thin air the rest of it did.

The aver­age cit­i­zen would be in prison for a long, long time if we pulled a stunt like that.

Just like the fam­ily in the video.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Dec 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.