When I read the news the other day, I was reminded of something I heard when I was younger.

I was about fourteen years old and had just started to pay attention to the news when I heard the adults at the kitchen table talking about something former Illinois senator Everitt Dirksen supposedly said.

“A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

At that time, the national debt was about 352 billion dollars. That’s Billion. With a B.

When you factor in inflation, that’s only 3.2 trillion dollars today.

That’s right, I said ONLY 3.2 trillion dollars. Trillion with a Capitol T.

The current national debt just reached $40 trillion. Trillion with a Capitol T.

How did things get so out of hand?

Republicans want to point the finger at Democrats, and Democrats blame the Republicans. But while those two sides have their pissing match, we’re the ones getting wet.

And while the R’s and D’s duke it out, the real answer on how it got so out of hand lies with us. Yes us. You and me are responsible for what may soon put us over a fiscal cliff.

To prove my point, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes from my talk radio days.

Deficit spending and the national debt have always been hot topics with me. I warned about the dangers often on my radio show.

I started my talk radio career during the Clinton administration. A brief moment in time when it looked like the Republicans and Democrats could possibly work together to try fix the problem during the dot-com boom.

That didn’t last long.

When George W. Bush became president, he inherited a national debt of 5.73 trillion dollars. By the end of his term, it had ballooned to 10.63 trillion dollars. I complained about how the deficit kept going up under Bush, and people called in and called me a liberal.

When Barack Obama took office, I complained about how government spending was increasing the debt even more, and those same Republican callers called in and praised me for attacking the Democrat. One caller actually said, “It’s about time you started seeing things our way.”

Another angle I occasionally took was asking callers to call in and tell me where the government should cut spending. But there was one caveat. You could only suggest cutting programs that benefited you. In other words, you couldn’t say cut farm subsidies if you weren’t a farmer or cut food stamps if you weren’t on them.

That made the conversation much more difficult. It’s easy to say that the government needs to cut spending as long as they’re not cutting into our benefits.

I checked all the Nebraska candidates for federal office websites to see what they were going to do about the deficit. All the candidates gave very generic, painless solutions. Some used the overused phrase of waste, fraud, and abuse without saying where the waste and abuse was, or who was committing the fraud.

When I brought up the 40 trillion-dollar figure on my social media page, you can probably guess how that turned out. One side blamed Biden; the other side blamed Trump. But nobody blamed who was really at fault.

Us. You and me.

To get this budget under control, it’s going to take all of us to fix it. It’s not the other guy’s responsibility; it is all of ours. There is no easy way out.

Government spending has got to be curtailed. But that means for everyone. Not just the poor or elderly on government assistance, but the rich military contractors and the farmers too.

Taxes are going to have to be raised for everyone, not just the Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s of the world. Leave the working poor alone, but raise the taxes on the middle class as well.

We need to raise the age of retirement and increase the ceiling on Social Security contributions too.

There is no one hundred percent solution to fix this crisis. There are a hundred one percent solutions.

But we can’t keep putting this off. It’s time to let our elected officials know that the country may be floating down the peaceful river now, but we can hear Niagara Falls in the distance. It’s time for all of us to start paddling to avoid the danger.

Whether Senator Dirksen actually said it or not, the time has come when we are now talking about real money.

Tom Becka is a long time Nebraska broadcaster who for over 30 years has been covering Omaha and Midwest issues on both radio and TV. He has been a guest on numerous national cable and news shows, filled in for nationally syndicated talk radio programs and Talkers Magazine has recognized him as one of the Top 100 talk show hosts in the country 10 times. Never afraid to ruffle some feathers, his ‘Becka’s Beat’ commentaries can be found online on Youtube and other digital platforms.

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