Let's ask France for Financial Advice.....

I don’t claim to be a financial wizard.  I don’t know much about debt ratings, money markets, the Federal Reserve, downgrades, upgrades, securities or the International Monetary Fund.  But I am aware of what happens if you spend more money than you take in.  That apparently makes me vastly more qualified to occupy a seat in Congress, or the White House than the folks that currently reside there.  Today we learned that S&P downgraded Uncle Sam’s triple A rating, (a rating that we have held since WWI by the way) to double A +.   And they didn’t lower it because we failed to raise our debt ceiling.  They lowered it BECAUSE we raised our debt ceiling.  Yes, the good old USA now is living in the credit rating shadow of France.  Let that sink in for a moment……….

The country that had the financial might to end World War One, that funded World War Two, that rebuilt Europe and Japan with their monetary strength after the war, that basically defeated the Soviet Union with it’s financial power, is now rated the same as New Zealand, and South Korea.  Well, that’s not really fair……. To New Zealand and South Korea, at least their outlook is rated as stable, ours is rated as negative.

How did we get here?  Well talking heads and politicians will no doubt provide us with a hundred different reasons for it.  Most of them will be wrong.  We are where we are right now because our elected representatives, or most of them anyway, can’t understand what virtually every responsible citizen in the United States already knows.  If you are having trouble paying your bills, the answer is not to borrow more money to pay them.  We understand that, and S&P also understands that.  If only our President and congress’s leadership had listened to those “Hostage Takers” and "Terrorists" from the tea party we would not find ourselves in the situation we are in now.  Of course you will never hear anyone on the major networks and CNN mention that little fact.  (I don’t even mention MSNBC)

I don’t really know what the long term effects of this event are.  But I hope that one of them is that we purge the squishy Republicans out of a job during the primaries and boot the bulk of the democrats out of office in 2012, including the jug eared jackass in the White House.