Sad Day in America

Our pencil sharpener quit working so I decided to see if I could fix it. That is what you do when something is not working like it was intended to, right? So how hard could it be to find a replacement gear, all I have to do is open a web browser, do a Google search and order a replacement gear from the manufacturer. WRONG! Can you believe here it is almost 2010 and they don't have a web presence. I did find an office products forum post that had quite a few other people looking for the same gear on similar models of my pencil sharpener. It looks like these nylon gears become brittle with age and eventually fail. By the looks of the serial number it was most likely made in 1982 so I guess I did get my moneys worth out of it. The only thing is I think it is a good sharpener with lots of life left in the motor and not ready for the junk box. But what do I do for a replacement gear? I don't have the equipment at home to cut a new gear. I'm hoping that someone might read this blog and want to take on making a gear for me but the chances of that happening is mighty slim. My other option is trying to find a replacement gear that I might be able to adapt to work.

Let me see if I have this right

Let say you have a checkbook and it is overdrawn. You've already spent more money than you'll ever earn so chances are you will never balance your budget. Now along comes a group of people who say they need to borrow a bunch of money from you so you pull out the checkbook and right them a check. This makes the group very happy and they go off start spending the money from the check that really doesn't have any money to begin with. Now they come back to you and say that they won't need as much money as thought they would need to begin with so they give some of it back. But remember they really didn't get anything to begin with because you didn't have anything to give them in the first place. So now you can go out and spend the money that you saved because they didn't use what you never really had in the first place.

Am I making myself clear?

According to the web site (which by the way is a government sponsored site)TreasuryDirect the current total public debt as of this writing is $12,079,739,352,131.13 give or take a few pennies. So if you are this deep in debt and you "save" some money that you didn't spend do you really have money to spend on something else?
Even if you were able to figure out a way to pay back the debt at a rate of one million dollars per second it would take 38 YEARS to pay back that amount. Now this is doable if you didn't have to spend money on operating the government that you already have. The only problem is that we haven't been able to pass a balanced budget in so long that I am beginning to doubt we ever will.