Did you realize that you are more than $46,000 in debt? This doesn’t include any money you may owe on your car or your home, or even some old student loans. Your kids are in debt too. Even the newest addition to my family owes this much and he is only 3 months old! What did he do to get into this type of financial trouble at such an early age? Bad parenting? More like bad governing.

Our national debt is over $14 trillion dollars. It has increased almost 50 percent since President Obama took office, but I am not just blaming him. This is not a Democratic or Republican problem as they have both contributed to this problem over the years. Republicans under the Bush administration did nothing to balance the budget and reduce our national debt. However, Democrats and President Obama have taken Republican fiscal incompetence to new heights by increasing the national debt in the last two years in what it took President Bush to do in eight.

Our national debt was one of the reasons given by Standard and Poor’s to recently downgrade the United States’ credit outlook to “negative.” However, our national debt is only a portion of the problem. The other end is our annual budget deficit. The government spends more than it brings in. Entitlement spending alone will crush us and our grandchildren into financial oblivion.

Who keeps their books this way anyhow? Oh yea…Enron. Except those crooks ended up in jail.

Now Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wants Congress to raise the debt ceiling….again. This is essentially the equivalent of raising the credit limit on a bankrupt person’s credit card. Where is this money coming from? Where everything else comes from…China.

A recent poll suggested that over 50 percent of Americans did not object to how many taxes they were paying. Coincidentally, the IRS also recently announced that 47 percent of Americans paid NO federal taxes under current tax law. I wonder how many of those 50 percent didn’t object because they weren’t paying anything?

I know how much money I make and with my wife, we budget that much every month. We spend less than we make and stay out of debt. My cars are older, but they are paid for and I have a house payment that is reasonable to my income. I also have some student loans that I continue to work to pay off. I have been wanting to buy an RV to take camping for quite some time, but it’s more important to me to save for my personal retirement and kids’ college and so I sleep in a tent for now. I am not bragging. I am no different than most people who work hard and strive to take personal responsibility and expect no less from our elected officials.

I am not a financial or economic expert. I am not going to pretend to know the economic impact of not raising the debt ceiling. However, I do know this. The definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We have continued to overspend and raise the debt ceiling to pay for that spending. Unless our elected officials do something different, nothing will change. Which is why I support spending cuts to immediately bring our current budget back into balance and why I support a balanced budget amendment to our constitution.

We must stop the fiscal “insanity.” The line must be drawn. I plead with Congress; please do something different and live within your means.