My Great Big Freakin' Mistake.

Congress just looked into the fiscal responsibility (or lack thereof) of the United States Military. For those of you who don't know, the U.S. carries a big stick. According to the latest information I could get from Wikipedia, America spent 489.20 billion U.S. dollars on its military or better yet $489,200,000,000. The United Kingdom, number two in Nato, spent 38.4 billion U.S. dollars on its military. France came in at 29.5 billion U.S. dollars.

I don't mind my government taxing me. I don't even mind it being a little higher than it already is. I just like for people to use the same responsibility they'd use for themselves. For instance we wouldn't blindly spend $320,000 per laborer when we don't even know what they do. We wouldn't fork over five million dollars for special vehicle training when we don't even know what the company is doing period. The New York Times wrote all of this in their most recent article.

In short, I would like to know that the technocrats and bureaucrats are putting in an honest days work for an honest day's wages. The libertarians are all wet if they believe we need a smaller government, we need a more streamlined government. One where money is as intelligently used as if it were the person's own bank account.

Which leads me to my biggest problem. We aren't even that good at managing our money. According to spurious information from that oracle known as the internet, 80% of Americans are two missed paychecks away from disaster; and about 40% spend 110% of their paycheck. (For those of us who aren't math majors, I can assure you that 100% is an amount that you can get from a paycheck, and the extra 10% probably comes from fairy land or China.) I tend to look down on these people who spend so foolishly, until I look at my credit card bills and realize I am darn close to being one of them.

It is very humbling to realize that something like thriftiness, which you have prided yourself on, isn't necessarily the whole truth about yourself. How easy it is to live a blind life free of worry about who we are. In some ways I could justify my faults saying things like, "while I was in college and high school I couldn't buy all the stuff I wanted" or "I know I'll use this doohickey and it won't be on sale for very long."

It is funny how much we live a bifurcated life with a clear line of demarcation for God's plan for our lives and our plan for our lives. And it is amazing that such a lie as a private life apart from God, a room of our own as it were, was something that we would enjoy, let alone have at all.

So in the end, for me it is back to savings accounts, Roth IRAs, and not buying every electronic gizmo that is advertised. It is about not eating out so much, conserving my gasoline, and learning to be happy with what I have. I suppose that if I could do this, I would be a better individual not just financially, but holistically. Perhaps our technocrats could learn this lesson. But not from me, I'm still learning it.