Time is money, borrowed time.

Courtesy of The National Debt Clock, This is a pie chart which depicts the present debt the U.S.A. is subject to one day be called upon to repay. At this very moment, it exceeds 11 trillion dollars and has just short of doubled since the beginning of the new millennium; I'm sure none of us are left to wonder why. As can be derived from yon happy pie-chart, about 23 percent of our debt, or around twenty five THOUSAND-BILLIONS of US minted George Washington faced Dollars are owed to other countries who have graciously accepted the burden of letting us live on their couches and eat their ramen noodles until we can get a steady job again, man. Take heart, however, that that is only about half of what the U.S. Government owes itself (see big red absence marker). Upon careful review of such a thought, that means that the mint has about 5 trillion dollars in print which cannot be supported by precious stone reserves.

Initially, in the days of the old west and the steam engine, paper notation was merely a means of not having to lug around heavy awkward ores of recently San Francisco mined gold, you took your gold, silver, iron, whatever, to your local (or federal) bank, who then weighed it and locked it into a vault, and gave you back cash, which then were essentially insured certificates of ownership, to be able to return and withdraw your share from the vault, or trade with others who could then CASH in on those material backed and recorded shares of the bank. It was about the time that credit became more than trust between two personally known individuals and evolved into a "buy now, pay later" mentality that the U.S. Mint started borrowing from itself, choosing to print paper notation that it didn't have any reason to believe it would ever be able to back with gold, that the red spot on that pie chart began it's steady climb to the bullyingly large sore that it is now. Before I get into the evils of modern credit and the scourge that it presents our economy, allow me to first point out that before we can repay China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and India the money that we have so hedonistically borrowed from them we must first be able to repay ourselves, only from that point can we begin regaining the money that we owe others in order to return it to them. There is a small but significant portion of inflation by the hand of fraudulent infiltration motivated printing, but as a whole, it is the self destructive nature of the people within our materialist economy and the greater pawns who assess and commandeer it who plunge(d) it into decay.

Raise taxes, raise the hell out of them. I kid you not, all the funding we have thrown at these fruitless wars and at fruitless war mongering countries has been pretend money. That's right, it might as well have been right out of a Monopoly (tm) board game set, because it certainly hasn't been coming out of any physical manifestation of anything worth the ink it's been rolled in. The measures we have taken in order to prevent counterfeiting; ballooning the faces of the presidents on the bills, pastel colors, comically over-sized numbers, are a priceless ironic parallel to their value that I cannot restrain myself from mentioning here. I know we'd all like to hang our heads in shame forever and pout about the suicidal state of affairs our last president left our country in, but it's time to man up and face the fact that we really don't have any choice whatsoever in the matter, it has to be fixed. I feel sorry for the economic advisor's working for the Obama administration right now, because they're stuck with having to find a way to subtract numbers until they add up to a greater sum. The only option is to tell everyone who objects to stuff it, raise sales tax, raise income tax and raise state taxes and let's all take one for the team here so that we won't become a third world country. There are plenty of people who defy this logic, this is the land of the free they say, true! Free and now at the bottom of a dry well with no uncannily sharp scottish sheep dog to call attention to the sheriff. I don't like it anymore than the next lower middle class chump, but the only solution to this problem is to SUCK IT UP and be completely penniless, without luxury and without mutiny for long enough to ensure that the next generation of Americans aren't handed the same bad deal that we were; you think it was unfair to us? Just imagine how unfair it will be to our children.

Re: Mad Chatter's take on Mandatory Organ Donation

Personal rights be damned! It is the meticulous emphasis on personal rights which kink the flow of an otherwise flawless democracy. Organ donations should be mandatory, I have mine down one and all to be donated at the moment of my death or viably permanent loss of consciousness.

"As citizens of a democracy, we simply enjoy our freedoms far too much to surrender them for a cause that, while noble and benevolent, is severely tarnished." Resonantly spoken! But cherish your freedoms by perpetuating them so that they remain polished. Trite.

Don't get me wrong, donor programs send vulturous, eager, stab happy people to follow ambulances, I've known some of these people, they are exactly as you've pictured them. But if in chance I am the recipient of an hepectomy while it's still servicing my still breathing body, but then my liver is given to someone else who can use it, that's democracy! Surely you cannot put so much weight into one single though very large example of a near miss as though it were the norm. People aren't stupid, even if they are motivated to steal your vital this's and that's. If that mans brain were taken out of his head and donated to research over his condition, or his heart lungs and blood given over to other people who weren't the lazarus that he was and weren't clinically pronounced dead but were in fact terminally ill, noone's the wiser. Who are we sparing here? Him? He didn't know he was going to wake up, his family? Doctors told them he was already gone. His organs? Why the @#$# save his organs just in case exactly what happened did? That is so ridiculously beyond probability that even the fact that it occurred doesn't justify pre-empting all future cases of vegetating head trauma with the logic that it will happen again. Lechery.

What about medical costs? We're talking about keeping every permanently comatose patient alive artificially indefinitely just because one man zombified. The anomalies here are the ones that live, not the ones that don't. Greed.

"If a law required all citizens to donate at least one organ after death, what kind of condition would these organs be in?"

I forgive you for this statement because clearly you are not pursuing a medical degree. We're not all quacks, the most simple of all and primary test performed before transplanting any organ whatsoever is a blood typing, they are required to make sure that the organs that are being transplanted will fit into the next person that will use them and not be eaten alive by that transplantee's own body. It should be given that they're going to know which organs not to use, it's not like they just toss them in a basement freezer and mark the expiration date with a sharpie on a ziploc baggie. If this is meant to inspire fear of wasted effort, they don't just take your organs out, they make sure that you don't have any diseases or pre-existing conditions before they even cut into your skin. Common sense.

To religions I say get over yourselves, your body can be a temple and a testament to whatever god you worship up to and beyond it's occupation by a soul with or without the crap inside it that makes it walk around, and it's not like in fifty years it's going to be sparkling after burial anyway. Decadence.

What about cremation upon death? That's like eating a case of mars bars in front of a third world inhabitant. Hypocrisy.

The benefits of mandatory organ extraction far, far, FAR outweigh the petty stipulations which are restraining it from becoming a law, I am personally disappointed in the vast quantity of people who feel that there are valid reasons to retain something that is useless to them and potentially life saving to others, I've lost faith in you, Americans, for reasons like this.