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.