Have your checkbook handy; you owe $10,000 for wars

Listen to Dave’s Commentary: Have your checkbook handy; you owe $10,000 for wars

Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction Co-Chairs Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, left, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., center, listen as Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf testifies before the committee on Capitol Hill in Washington.

The Congressional Supercommittee, which is using its X-ray vision to figure out why we owe so much, has already met its archenemy: elementary arithmetic.

Which states that to make any large negative number disappear, you must offset it with an equal or larger positive number.

SO perhaps we could simplify this.

There is one huge unpaid budget item which everyone understands: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve cost $1.2 trillion so far. There was no special tax imposed; every penny was borrowed. That’s no sin; the founders did the same during the American Revolution.

But they paid it back because they had pledged their lives FORTUNES and sacred honor to the cause, and they were patriots.

If WE are patriots, we must be willing to pay for OUR wars, and if you plug in the numbers, you find that comes a little more than $10,000 per household. And so the Supercommittee can begin by urging each American household to write the Pentagon a check for $10,000. At least each patriotic household. Deadbeats will be deadbeats. But REAL patriots know the only HONEST way to support America’s fighting men and women is to compensate them for the sacrifices they have made.

And in keeping with the anti-tax spirit, this would not be a tax, it would be a contribution. In the spirit of personal responsibility, the Supercommittee would post the names of the deadbeats who refuse to write the check. So you could see whether your neighbor really is the patriot he claims to be. There you go. I think we just raised $1.2 trillion, America.

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