Uncle Charley Pays Off The National Debt

I knocked on Uncle Charley's door. When he came to the door, I handed him the sack of peaches Elaine had picked up at the Farmer's Market that morning.

"Howdy, and thanks!", he said, looking into the bag. "Them peaches look real good. Don't know whether to eat 'em in a bowl with cream or make a pie with 'em. Come on in."

I followed him into his small and neat living room and sat down while he took the peaches into the kitchen.

"Tell Elaine I said 'thanks'," he said as he put them down on the kitchen table. "I appreciate her pickin' 'em up at the Market. Saves me a trip".

"Be glad to, Charley," I answered, looking at the pile of papers scattered over the desk. "What you working on?"

"Been thinking about that national debt thingie," he answered. "Them politicians keep saying we got to spend more money because we're in debt, and they got some economists who say we can pay it off. The same economists who recommended we get in debt in the first place."

"Doesn't sound reasonable, does it?"

"Nope. I got some ideas that would work, but they'd be real unpopular."

"I don't think anything we do that solves this mess is going to be popular," I said.

"Right. That's why they're not gonna solve it. They need the popular votes more than they need us to be solvent. Can't spend our way out of debt, nobody can. We gotta raise more money and spend less, and that's the long and the short of it."

"What do you have in mind?" I asked.

"Well, we can raise a lot of money if we can get the people who aren't paying income taxes to pay what they owe. You got any idea how many people don't pay taxes?"

"A lot," I said. "Lots of people work for cash only, most of them working people, not many of them well-to-do. But there are a lot of them. And a lot of illegal immigrants who do work that we can't get Americans to do at the price, and we still have to pay for their medical expenses and for putting their kids through school."

"That' s right," Charley said. "So getting them to help pay for the system that helps them is important for us.That's one part of my plan. Here's some more ideas: We let anybody who wants to come here to work do so, but they have to register and they have to pay income taxes. We legalize drugs, subsidize them and drive the cartels out of business, and un-employ all the young people who are living on the drug profits so they'll have to find work. We add a small national sales tax on everything but food, medicine and rent. We stop federal subsidies for everthing that can be put off for a couple of years, because right now we can't afford long-term investments. We switch to socialized medicine so that medical bills can't bankrupt us."

"A lot of people, probably most of us, won't have nearly as much money as we are used to now. There'll be a lot of unhappiness, anger, maybe revolts."

"Yep," Charley said. "It's gonna be bad. But if we don't accept bad times now, we're gonna have to accept terrible times later, so terrible that we might not ever recover. Like taking bitter medicine. I got more ideas, but they ain't any more optimistic."

"Geez, Charley. That's about as bleak a picture as you can paint."

"That's right, Harry. Here, eat a peach to take out the bad taste."

"Gonna take a lot of peaches."

"You got that right," he said cheerfully.

Uncle Charley and the National Budget

Uncle Charley was reading the paper so intently he hardly noticed me as I sat down across from him with my coffee.

"You read the paper this morning?" Charley asked without preamble.
"A little," I answered. "Lot of politics, lot of bad news."

"Yep," he said. "Kinda proves my point".

"Which would be what?"

He put the paper down and looked straight at me. "No offense, Harry, but you don't read most of the paper, and you're an educated man. How are you supposed to form an opinion to guide your elected representative if you don't have any information?"

"In the first place, Charley," I answered, "the politicians don't seem to care what I think. And in the second place, the newspaper isn't a very good source of information. Mostly talks about local scandals and deaths."

"And that is my point", Charley said. "I'm thinking that we're looking at the coming failure of representative democracy. And by that I mean it's failing now. The politicians feather their nests, and when they do listen to their constituency it's just to figure out how to please them and get re-elected. So we got really a people's democracy, which is a bad idea, because it means that our country is more and more run by the votes of people even less educated than you. Here's the important thing: They vote for what they want, not what's good for the country."

"What's got you so pessimistic all of a sudden?" I asked, pouring another cup.

"No 'all of a sudden' to it," Charley answered with some bitterness. "But what's happening in Greece really got me to think harder about it. You know about the Greek situation?"

"I've read a little and heard on NPR a little more. I think if it weren't for Diane Reems I wouldn't know much at all".

"OK, let me give you a quick summary," Charley said. "They got real far in debt, and they got the EU to help them by buying a bunch of gummint bonds. Basically they got a long-term loan and they're trying to live on that money".

"I read that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with that among the Greek people."

"Oh yeah. Well, the gummint says they all got to cut back and quit living off the gummint and start paying off their debts. They call it a "austerity" program, which means they been living too high off the hog for too long, and now they gotta live within their means, even save some money so's they can pay their debts. Heck, we've all had that happen to us. It's not a big deal for us to cut back when we have to and live within the budget. But gummints don't seem to like to live that way. So the Greek gummint got itself way too deep in debt, and it borried a lot more money to bail itself out, which is kinda like usin' yer credit card to pay your debts."

"So now the people of Greece have to cut way back, and that's what they're protesting about, huh?"

"You got it. They know they gotta, and they don't wanta, so they're mad, and they expect the politicians to cave in and give 'em back their goodies."

"But they can't do that, can they?" I said. "The politicians let themselves get into a corner by pleasing the people, and now they can't get out without losing all those votes by people who are used to being taken care of."

"That's about the size of it," Charley said. "What the people want is what every spoiled child in the world wants. And it's bad for 'em if they get it,and they want it anyway."

"Sounds a lot like us," I commented. "We've been living beyond our budget for years, been borrowing money and going into debt to other countries, like China, and we just keep borrowing more."

"The politicians know what needs to be done, but they don't want to take action in an election year, 'cause all us spoiled brats will get mad. So the debt limit gets raised, and the reckoning is coming due. I'm afraid that when it does hit the fan, we're gonna have a collapse so big we may never be able to recover. It's happened before, but not on this scale. Hell, Harry, we owe most everybody in the world! How we gonna pay 'em?"

"Seems to me that sooner or later we're gonna have to go on an "austerity budget" like we should have been on all along. Our mistake was allowing a negative budget, where we spend more than we're making. That should never have happened. I can't even imagine what we're going to do."

"Probly just what the Greek people are doin'," Charley answered. "We'll go out and holler in the streets because we can't have as much of the goody-pie as we're used to. But tantrums don't solve problems, and even real loud whinin' and bitchin' doesn't make us entitled. Sooner or later, though, we got no choice."

"Charley, you got me worried."

"Yeah? Why weren't ya already worried? This isn't new, it's been coming on for 50 years or more, whenever we stopped stayin' inside our budget. Yer just gettin' worried now because you can see it coming in the near future".

"I hate it when you're right", I said, glumly.

"Bein' right is small consolation," Charley said, and got up to go.

I sat there for a while, but I didn't like what I was thinking, so I left too.

Uncle Charley and the Drug War

"Great dinner, Elaine", Charley said contentedly as he pushed his chair back. "Could I have a little more coffee?"

I got up and got the coffee. Elaine brought her coffee in and sat down. "Charley," she said, "I've been reading about the drug war, and how expensive and unsuccessful it is."

"Yep", he said. "Prolly nobody ever thought it would work. It's just a gesture, I guess."
"Just a P C thing to do?"

"Would be my guess. We've tried all kinds of bans on stuff, and when has it worked? We banned liquor and created organized crime,and now we're back to selling liquor. England tried to stop opium back at the start of the last century, and that didn't work. We've been fighting drugs for the last 50 years, spent I don't know how much, and there's more drugs on the street than ever."

I leaned back in my chair. "Do you think we should just do what China did?"

"You mean just execute all the drug dealers and send the users off to a work camp or something? That might fly in China. They got a surplus of people anyhow. I don't see us putting up with that here."

"You always have some ideas, Charley," Elaine said. "What have you thought of this time?"

"Hmmm. Truth to tell, I have given it some thought. The problem is that drugs are a major money maker. Drug sales are among the biggest businesses in the U.S., and they don't pay taxes neither. All the "war on drugs" thing does is to cut back on the supply, then of course the prices go up, and it's business as usual. So it seems to me that the only thing that might stop drug sales is to make it unprofitable, like they did for heroin in England."

"How would we do that?" I asked.

"I have a thought, but I don't think you're gonna like it."

"OK, OK," Elaine said. "Spit it out. I'm out of coffee."

"Well, what if the gummint took over the drug business? Starting with something like cocaine and crack. We'd use that budget set up for the useless War On Drugs and spend the money on buying cocaine from the source. Pay 'em their regular price and everything. Then we'd give it away to everyone old enough to vote who wants it. What's gonna happen is that we'll drive the cartels and the gangs out of business. Can't get much lower price than free. Then there's nobody to push the drugs or get people hooked on them, and eventually the market would drop. Might take years, but you'd be able to see a steady decline in sales when you have to pick your drugs up from a gummint drug store. Why would you pay a lot of bucks on a street corner and risk being poisoned, when you can get 'em from the gummint cheap and clean and in the daylight?"

"What an idea," I said. "Some people will think it's immoral."

"What's going on now is immoral. The gummint ain't trying to build up a market for drugs. It would be tryin' to destroy the drug market by making it unprofitable. And think of all that money going to pay off cops and entire gummints in Latin America. Those people might end up with a gummint that ain't corrupt."

"Right now the US is a major source of income for some of the poorest countries," I commented.
"In Afghanistan the major cash crop is the opium poppy, and if we stopped sending them money they'd be in trouble".

"That's always the problem with countries with just one cash crop. They're always on the edge of disaster," Charley said. "Right now our citizens are sending money to the poor people of Colombia or wherever, and with the Uncle Charley Plan they'd keep on getting their money, so we wouldn't be hurting them. Just the gangs and the cartels, and you can bet they wouldn't like it. So if my little plan was proposed, it'd be right interesting to see which congressmen would agree with the cartels. And you know that some of them are taking dirty money. When there's that much dirty money out there, it's impossible to stop corruption and bribery. So the only way to get things cleaner is to make drugs unprofitable."

"I like it, Charley," my wife said. "I never thought I'd say that about one of your hair-brained ideas, but this one has some possibility. But what are you going to do about all those federal employees in the drug war, like the DEA?"

"Good question," Charley grinned. "We can have them manage the Gummint Uncle Charley Drug Stores! They would have to take a cut in pay, but at least they wouldn't be having gun battles with gangs. Now, I haven't figured out what to do about home-grown drugs, but where there's too much profit there's gonna be graft and corruption and violence. So any solution has got to involve taking away the profit margin."

"Give up profit?" I laughed. "Why, that's almost... un-American!"

"The more you feed the animal, the bigger it gets," Charley said.

"And that's the truth." Elaine added.