Let's See Those Zeros - No More M's, B's, or T's

My proposal seems pretty simple, and some may say it would make no difference, but I'd like the government to start using real numbers. In their budgets, in the congressional bills, in reports of actual spending. I'd like the newspapers to do the same. It would be quite the task for Washington, as the accountants would have to use 6,9, or 12 zeros instead of one letter, or instead of making the numbers look smaller by placing the phrase "all amounts are in millions" in the fine print. It would also require them to count those zeros, and double check for accuracy. That is fine with me. I'll foot the bill for the extra accounting hours, and I doubt too many taxpayers would fight that one. It's small in comparison to the other things they kindly sign us up to pay for.

Seriously though, we all know that if we have cash, as opposed to a credit card, it is a lot harder to justify buying things we'd have no problem purchasing on plastic. We see our money leave our hands, without having to wait for a statement, only requiring a small minimum payment. This is the oldest trick in the book for debt counselors. After requiring a person or couple to draft up a reasonable budget, they then give the person a set amount of cash, that's it, no more. People start spending less when this happens, because they realize there isn't a magic money fairy that will come replace their supply. Reality hits.

The proposed health bill is supposed to add between $1T and $1.6T in debt, there is no mention of the cost, only what will be added in debt. That's fine and dandy, aside from the fact that more than 25,000,000 people will still be without insurance AND those people will have to pay a fine to the government for not having insurance. To top it all off, it will be the very people the "universal healthcare bill" is supposed to help! Those who don't make at least 150% of the federal poverty level WON'T have health care, and they'll be fined for not having it. This fine of course will go to help fund the health care for the other people who do qualify. It's absolutely absurd! And the amount of debt that we will further drown ourselves and our children in? Well that's a mere $1,000,000,000,000 to $1,600,000,000,000. That's all, no worries. Yeah, look at those zeros, a bit different than the seemingly innocent "T", yes?

One more thing, house bills, how about a page limit? Say 25 pages, maybe 75? I think 75 would be more than generous. It irritates me beyond belief that the bills finding their way to congress these days are sometimes longer than the Bible. It takes me a day or two to read the Bible, but I wouldn't retain a whole lot of it. There is way too much room to sneak in unrelated "projects", or laws, which should be done away with. Simplicity is usually best, so is saving trees. It really gets me when people who claim to want to save the environment, because of course the earth will implode in 5 minutes if we don't do something NOW, waste thousands of pages of paper just to write up a bill and distribute copies throughout congress. Honestly, after the initial bill, revisions, and the final bill going through congress, how many trees are brutally murdered to get a bill through? I would like to know. It needs to stop, and it needs to stop NOW. I'm not an environmentalist, but I don't believe in wasting resources, including paper needlessly. That's the thing though, I don't proclaim to want to "save the earth" by radically changing the way we live, a lot of these politicians claim that is their goal, yet they would knock over a whole forest to supply the paper their precious self serving bills are wasting.