This past Monday something happened and many of America’s citizens never felt the beginning ripples of a financial tsunami taking shape. The United States reached its debt limit of nearly $14.3 trillion and according to a federal law passed by Congress, our nation cannot borrow money unless a new debt ceiling law is passed.

If you are like me, you already know that our elected officials in Washington are spinning in circles and not getting much done for the good of our nation. It’s not that I want to see Washington continuing to borrow money in order to spend more because it’s high time that government spending at all levels is reduced. But, since 1962, Congress has raised the debt ceiling 74 times so it’s obvious members of Congress talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to cutting spending.

One huge problem that the United States has is that it spends $118 million a month more than it gets in revenue from taxes and other sources. That is a deficit around $1.5 trillion in this year’s budget alone which means that we are getting deeper in debt just to borrow money to pay for money we already borrowed. We often hear about Congress cutting the spending deficit, which is not the same as cutting our national debt. By cutting the deficit we could cut the amount that the United States needs to borrow each month ($118 million a month) but that’s not solving the problem of our national debt because we are not making any payments toward the debt. It would be like us citizens using a credit card to pay against another credit card and never making payments toward the balance due. All we would be doing is paying interest on an ever-increasing debt and soon we would be in financial trouble.

Sure, there are things the United States can do. Would you like to buy an interstate highway and make it a private toll road? How about a bridge? I was talking to a friend that remembered a private toll bridge between New Hampshire and Vermont over the Connecticut River. One either paid a nickel or drove dozens of miles to find another bridge that was free. I guess our nation could sell some of the hundreds of millions acres of land it owns or maybe some of the millions of buildings it owns. There’s even a proposal to sell the gold that is stored at Fort Knox, even though the amount brought in would only cover somewhere around 8 percent of our national debt.

What will more than likely take place is that the U.S. Treasury Department will withhold payments to federal retirement funds, which could fund the federal budget until August and possibly cause some parts of government to shut down. That might sound good but remember part of the $14.3 national debt is money the U.S. Treasury owes to the Social Security Administration.

It’s time for action by elected officials at all levels of government. Maine had something like this happen when members of the Legislature raided the state retirement system, which is now owed more than $4 billion and it’s time to pay it while we seem to have an eternal shortfall in the state budget. Yet, we still see state agencies waste money like the 30 Truck Stop Electrification units installed at a cost of $1.2 million (cheap, wink, wink) in the relatively new rest area in Gardiner that services both I-95 and 295. These are units that provide cooling, heating and Internet access so that the truck doesn’t have to sit there for 10 hours and foul the air with the pollution caused by running a diesel engine. The only problem is that there aren’t many truckers using this facility for that purpose. Other states have similar problems.

We listened to the music and now it’s time to pay the band except that we are broke. It’s too bad that members of Congress and state legislatures don’t have dishes to wash. It’s probably a good thing because they would more than likely either break them or try to sell them. Some would give some dishes away as foreign aid. I highly recommend the readers go to You Tube and search for a video titled: “Brother, can you spare a trillion?” as it’s enlightening.

Lane Hiltunen, of Windham, wonders when Windham councilors will answer the questions asked by citizens.