A recent writer in the Enterprise noted that our federal government is in debt for $9 trillion. The latest figure that I have seen is $4 trillion, but that is no reason to relax.

Consider: if you can earn $45,000 a year, and keep every cent of it (somebody else pays your taxes, your rent, your food, your electricity, your ice cream cones, everything) you can be a millionaire in 22 years and three months. If you want to be a billionaire, you will have to work (and keep everything) for 22,000 years, and to be a trillionaire you will have to work (and stay alive) for 222,000 years. Four trillion dollars would mean you work 888,000 years (almost a million years)

The $4,000,000,000 is only our current debt (what we owe right now, today). But as time rolls on, our current and future obligations (such as my children and yours and some of you now reading this enter the Social Security program, Medicare, and so on) is going to rise to $46,000,000,000. Now, going from 4 to 46 isn't much of a jump, but if you want to be a $46 trillionaire, you will have over 10 times as long, and now I can't count that high - only the federal bureaucrats can.

How did we get to the point of trillions of dollars in debt? No one item did it, but "a little" here, "a little" there, soon mounts up if you don't watch. I am reminded of the senator some 40 or so years ago who said, "A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."

Some are blaming the Iraqi war, but that war is taking less than 10 percent of our budget. Our problems started long before the war.

One significant problem is "earmarks" on congressional bills. That is where a senator or a congressman can add a section onto a bill which is about to be passed, earmarking a specified amount of money for his pet project. The earmark does not have to be related in any way to the bill at hand, and amount is unlimited (some are for millions of dollars) with no discussion, no debate, because they are not related to the bill being debated.

Consider the Senate 2006 Transportation/Treasury Appropriations committee, which added 874 pork projects for $128 billion, few of which had anything to do with transportation. The Senate also upped the president's budget request for Amtrak for $360 million to $145 billion (no, this is not a misprint) despite the miserable revenue record and usage of Amtrak.

Closer to home, there was no request to fund the Appalachian Development System (the interstate corridor to run through West Virginia and Kentucky, up there close to Pikeville and running parallel to KY 80 from London to Somerset) but the Senate tossed in $80 million anyway. (The system just happens to run through the states of seven members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, one of whom is Mitch You-Know-Who, and Hal You-Know-Who.) I can't find out how much money (or even whether) this corridor is projected to save in transportation costs through Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi.

"Well," you say, "we certainly should get some of that free money." FREE??? If you said that, you should be in Congress giving away all that free money, not worrying about who supplies the money, because that is exactly what our Congress is not doing. They (the people who are supposed to represent us in Washington) are writing an IOU to the Treasury Department, "borrowing" money from the Social Security fund, to pay for all these little goodies, with absolutely no arrangement made to repay that so-called loan. What the members of Congress are doing is sending wads of money back home so that the grateful constituency will favor them in the next election, allowing them to stay in that insulated cocoon of Washington, D.C.. I think our middle-schoolers (maybe not our high-schoolers, but that is another story) could do a better job of accountability.

So-o-o, $9 trillion? What's that? Leave it to those who come after us to figure out how to finance it. The Republicans in Congress learned the earmark lesson well from their Democrat predecessors, but they missed one salient point - the people who vote were watching. The People Who Vote had voted the Democrats down six years ago for spending too much, depending on the Republicans to cure the spending spree. The Republicans were poor students of the electorate, however. They thought that the way to our hearts was to pour out more money with earmarks, and were stunned when they "lost control" of Congress in this last election. Now a recent columnist in the Enterprise, who occupies this space on Saturdays, says that the Democrats are going to cure this spending ailment, the ailment that they invented. I sincerely hope that he is right, but I'm not holding my breath to see the salvation.

I have said previously, and I repeat, we need to vote the old rascals out every two years, and send up a new set of rascals for a two year stint. Accountability is the code word.

****

I must say it: I was deeply disappointed, although I must confess not surprised, that iconoclast Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, waxed eloquent in her criticism of the honor paid former President Gerald Ford in eulogies. She had absolutely nothing good to say for him, nor for those who delivered eulogies.

My disappointment is in the fact that she could not say even "Rest in Peace," but rather, twisted and tortured comments on his accomplishments. I think that Mr. Ford will not go down as one of the great presidents of this United States of America, but he did have some significant accomplishments, only one of which was in the healing in the country after President Nixon (my opinion of whom is another story).

Her diatribe was not just that of a poor loser, but one of a non-winner, an also-ran. Of Mr. Ford, I say RIP. His influence on his country was positive. Of Ms Dowd, I say Get Lost.