Currently one of the big discussion items is health care. The problem with the discussion is a major piece of logic is missing. Right now the promise is "pie in the sky" with cost in the range of 1,200,000,000,000 +. Now history tells us that one thing the government can do well is to underestimate the cost of any program. This also does not really matter for the sake of this assessment. It is just something to keep in the back of your mind.

If your budget was $50,000 a year, but you wrote checks for $71,529 a year what would happen? Is it not a crime? You would have written checks for 43 percent more money than you actually had. Truly this is not a possible option for a non-criminal, right?

The federal income for 2009, according to the CBO August report is projected to be $2,100,000,000,000. The same CBO report projects federal spending for 2009 to be $3,688,000,000,000. This means just for 2009, we will spend $1,588,000,000,000, or 43 percent more then we have in income. Add that to the debt we have accumulated from years past, which is the number you keep hearing in the news — approximately $11,939,000,000,000.

Now remember this is without health care and other current spending bills, like stimulus II and who knows what others are being batted around for sure to be factored in. No matter what those bills are they will only add to the budget, causing an even quicker increase in deficit. The only thing these bills will do is speed up the demise of our nation. Couple this insane spending with the continued decrease in jobs currently official 10.2 percent unemployment and realistic rate of 17.5 percent when all unemployed, including those who just gave up the search, are added in. This means even more loss in revenue and the recipe for the collapse is increased a few-fold.

The real discussion we should be having is where do we start to cut spending? It is obvious this needs to happen and we need to start the cutting yesterday, not after everything falls apart. For a good example of things to come, look at the state of Georgia, which has already realized a large decrease in income due to the economy and has had to make adjustments to the state budget once already this year, with new cuts in the works as I write this letter.

Remember the saying “you do not get something for nothing”? Ask yourself what are you giving away? What happens when the dollar becomes useless? There are one or two answers to the next question, but both answers lead to bad results. Do the members of Congress know what they are doing? If so, tell us how this cannot play out with anything but a total collapse of the dollar? If not, then why do you think you can make things better by spending money like hotcakes? Better yet, why are you in office? Now the question is what can you do about this? Recognize where this is heading. Get involved and make your representatives work for you. Bring common sense back into the main stream.

Jeff Korson

Alapaha