Foy: What happens when you don’t pay your bills?
What happens to ordinary people who don’t pay their bills? If you don’t pay your electric bill, sooner or later, your electricity will get shut off. If you don’t pay your rent or mortgage, sooner or later, your landlord will evict you, or your house will be foreclosed by the bank. Even if these drastic events don’t occur, your credit score will drop, and you will be unable to borrow money or get credit cards. You may have creditors hounding you for money and may get to the point where you have to declare bankruptcy.
Delaware, along with many other states, has a balanced budget and a rainy day fund to deal with emergencies. Our state constitution demands that our politicians act responsibly with money.
But what happens when the federal government doesn’t pay its bills? It doesn’t face the consequences that ordinary people and states do because it isn’t obligated to live within its means. The government can print money to cover whatever debts it has incurred — and this process makes the money in circulation worth less and less, leading to rampant inflation, sometimes much higher than we’ve experienced in the last three years.
The Convention of States movement has a solution. We need to propose amendments to the Constitution to require our federal government to handle money more responsibly. Congress has made it clear that it will never control its own spending, so we, the people, need to demand accountability.
Susan Foy
Bear
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
