Let’s suppose that your spouse compulsively spent every last cent of your combined incomes…and then continued to spend. Now you owe more credit card debt, home equity loan debt, and payday cash advances than any ten other and saner families.

After extreme diplomacy in the interest of keeping your marriage intact, you get the big spender to sit down with you at the kitchen table in order to strategize…how to handle all that debt while continuing to accumulate more of the same?

Tears, name-calling, accusations, denial all follow one another in rapid succession. You have made no impression. You despair. And then suddenly, Big Spender gives you a big smile and says, “Wait. Let’s not panic. I have an idea.”

Ever hopeful, you return that smile and wait for the idea.

Big Spender says, “In order to dig out from under this financial nightmare, we’ve got to give. Yes, I said give. Let’s hand out cash to everyone we meet.”

Blood pressure mounting to life threatening numbers, you choke out a question, “Did you just say that we have to give away money? We have none to give.”

Big Spender says, “Well, of course, we’ll have to borrow at first. Take out more loans. However, as time goes on, we’ll harvest the sure reward of that old saying that you reap what you sow and when you sow to the wind, you reap the whirlwind.”

You have a stroke and die. End of story.

That story is well underway in Washington, D.C. where our president has grandly proposed that since we’re overwhelmingly in debt, totally out of funds, we ought to supply each taxpayer with another deduction…$800.00. He wants to give away money that we don’t have…well, he wants to do more of that than he’s already done. This “conservative” president has been the biggest spender in memory.

I have no idea if he really thinks that money is something you can run off on a printer in the White House basement. Or maybe he saw a re-run of that Batman movie where the Joker rides through Gotham on a parade float, tossing dollar bills to the crowd. President Bush, “Hey, that looks like fun. I’m gonna do that, too!”

My standard for a better president than the one we’ve got isn’t very high. All I ask is that we elect someone unlikely to ride around tossing Monopoly money out the windows of his limousine, and yelling, “Wheeeeee,” under the pretext that this will fix the nation’s financial woes.