The Government Spent Two Trillion More Than It Had. You Did That.

I kept books for thirty-one years. Small businesses, mostly. The kind where the owner finds out on a Tuesday that the business is out of money, and the owner is the one who spent it, and there is no one to blame who is closer than a mirror.

So when I read that the federal government spent nearly $2 trillion more than it collected last year, I did not feel shock. I felt recognition. I have seen this face before. It is the face of a person who has been spending money he does not have and has just been told, by an accountant, that the spending is now a number.

Here is the part the coverage keeps missing, because the coverage is written by people who have never had to make payroll on a Friday. A deficit is not a policy. A deficit is a receipt. Nobody votes for a deficit. A hundred million small, reasonable, specific things happen — a subsidy here, a program there, a tax cut with a sunset clause that never sets — and at the end of the year a man in a windowless room adds them up, and the number is two trillion, and the man did not choose the number. He found it.

The efficiency people will tell you they cut $170 billion. I believe them. I also know that in my thirty-one years, the businesses that died were never the ones that cut. They were the ones that cut the cost of the thing and kept the cost of the building. Washington cut the staff and kept the diesel.

The two parties spent the week blaming each other for the deficit, the political equivalent of two roommates arguing about who left the dishes in the sink while the sink is on the floor. One party calls the deficit a crisis and votes for the spending. The other calls the deficit a crisis and votes for the spending. The difference between them is which font the spending is printed in.

I am not going to tell you the answer is to cut everything, because I am an accountant and I know that the government is not a business, and a business that loses two trillion a year is closed, and a government that loses two trillion a year is America, and you cannot close America, you can only pay for it, slowly, in your thirties, in April.

The number is two trillion. It went up twelve percent in one year. The interest on the debt is now a trillion a year, which means the country’s second-largest expense is the price of not having paid for the first-largest expense.

I am not a cynic. I am a man who kept books. The books are the books. The only people who can fix the books are the people who cannot read them, and they are in charge of the books, and they are running for re-election on the strength of the books.

The hearing on the deficit is scheduled for next month. The hearing on the hearing is scheduled for the year after.

BARRY WINTHROP is a columnist for Freedom Eagle and a retired certified public accountant. He has never worked in government, a fact he considers his primary qualification.