This year, we're only $296 billion in the hole. I say "only", because apparently we were projected to be closer to $423 billion in the hole for this year.
Does this mean anything to anyone?
I can't even fathom what these figures mean, and I don't trust anyone who claims that they do. I'm just trying to wrap my brain around what it will take to "purchase" (i.e., go into great debt to a bank for the privilege of living in) a modest home in the near future--and I do mean modest--and that blows my mind.
I was recently having one of those wonderful, wide-ranging and marginally sober conversations of the sort you can only have with complete strangers in airport bars, in which we (my companions de jour and I) concluded that when easy money flows freely--be it in the form of 99-year mortgages or having a permanent monopoly on collecting tribute by force--you end up with a situation in which everybody has lots of stuff, but nobody actually owns anything.
Is all this really connected? I don't know. Like I said, I don't understand it one bit.
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