This week, President Obama submitted his budget to Congress. The budget called for 3.6 trillion dollars in government spending; that’s $3,600,000,000,000. He was proud of his work because, he said, he cut $17 billion dollars in government programs, which he said is “real money.” Now, to you and me, $17 billion is a lot of money; but to the Federal budget, it is a real drop in the bucket. Obama’s cuts in programs are ½ of 1% of this budget, or, .005 of the budget. Put another way, the total spending in the Obama budget is $11,613 for every man, woman and child in the United States. The cuts in programs comes to $54.84 for every man, woman and child in the United States. To put this is real terms that everyone can understand, even a Congressman, the spending in government programs is less than one year’s tuition, room and board at Christendom College. The alleged savings of $54.84 will not buy even ONE standard micro-macroeconomics textbook, the price of which usually runs over $100.

Suppose we couple this with the FULL national debt. The national debt clock says that the regular national debt is $11.3 trillion dollars. The unfunded mandates from Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements, coupled with the official national debt, add up to more than $55 trillion dollars—CURRENTLY. How much of the $3.6 trillion dollars will the Federal Government be able to fund with taxes? The national debt after the 2010 fiscal year is expected to be over $12 trillion dollars (see http://www.federalbudget.com). The chart at the above site seems to show that the increase in the budget deficit will be more than $1 trillion dollars. For the sake of argument, let us assume a conservative $1 trillion increase in the national debt (ignoring an increase in entitlements). This will be an increase of $3,226 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

The current interest on the national debt, that is, the tax money we spend to holders of United States government bonds, many of which are held by China, to fund the government accumulated deficits, is $412 billion per year, and climbing. So the interest on the national debt part of the budget alone is $1,329 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

Josef Stalin said that the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic. Of course, we are not speaking about death here, but do you really think that these numbers are merely statistics? Someone will have to pay for these debts. Every year the interest on the profligate spending of the Federal Government, which, by the way, you the voters, many of whom are Catholic, approve, grows. Suppose the interest you had to pay on your house and/or car grew in this way. How many extra jobs would you have to get to keep up with the payments? When you had no more time to work, then what? Would your whole family have to work, even the little kids? Would you be able to leave your wife and kids any inheritance? How much would you be able to give to charity?

If these trends continue, the ordinary people will have very little money to live beyond a very low standard. This will not happen necessarily in this generation, but what about your children and grandchildren? We are mortgaging their future so that we can be taken care of by a paternalistic government which is more than willing to exchange votes in the short term to ravage the wealth of the nation like a plague of locusts. Where is the outrage? Where even is the common sense? Where did our morality go, that we can stick our progeny with our debts?

This line from an old pizza commercial brings up an exercise in one of my management courses when studying for my MBA. What you had to do is think for a while about what you would like your epitaph to say about you. I never thought about it this way. Another way to put this exercise is to ask, “What kind of a person are you? How do you want people to remember you?”

The Catholic Church focuses a lot on sin, and rightly so. Catholics examine their consciences, or should examine their consciences, frequently. But much of what is contained in a list of sins to be checked against our thoughts and actions leaves a lot under the radar. Pope John Paul II has contributed, along with some phenomenologists such as Max Scheler and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), to examining personhood, and there are many Catholics who may or may not be sinners according to the list in the books, of which I cannot judge, but they fall short in their personhood.

The reason for this is that we generally see personhood as a static concept. We say that the unborn baby is a person, and so it is. But it is in an undeveloped stage. The personhood requires development, and the development of personhood requires that we open our hearts to others, that we have empathy, that we see ourselves as the image of the persons of the Blessed Trinity, who are known to us as complete self-giving. In short, personhood is the gift of ourselves to others.

Unfortunately in my experience, I have run into many Catholics, some of whom have professed themselves to be exemplary, who have been very short on personhood. They are self-centered, arrogant, intellectual bullies, unable to empathize, paranoid and uncaring. These folks have persecuted me and others seemingly for no other reason than that it makes them feel superior.

These things not only have spiritual consequences but economic as well. The reason that we were asked to perform this exercise in a management class is so we can examine how we treat others. Being mean and hard on others is not just plain anti-personhood for the actor himself, but it is discouraging to employees, customers, suppliers. Surgeons are notoriously compatible with this non-person model, and I wonder how many medical students have decided not to specialize in surgery due to the arrogance of those who are supposed to teach and guide them. Mean teachers, and we all have probably had experience with this, discourage academic performance. And how many mean confessors have dissuaded penitents from returning to confession. I have been mistreated by many priests, nuns and lay Catholics so that it is a miracle that I still have my Faith. (My wife says that we cannot take it out on Jesus for the faults of his followers.)

Interestingly enough, the people who do these things may not even really know that they do them, because they never truly examined their personhood—that is, how much empathy do they have, how much self-gift are they. Ultimately, John Paul says, man is meant to give and receive love, and real love is not the “love” that is mean “for the beloved’s own good.” Love is the self-giving that we see in the Trinity. It requires humility, kindness, empathy, long-suffering, “living with” another.

Take the case of entrepreneurs. The myth about them is that they do what they do for money. The truth is that they never do what they do for money, and if someone does entrepreneurial activity just for the money, they will fail. Entrepreneurs take risks, raise money, usually from relatives and friends, and work their fingers to the proverbial bone with virtually no return for years, for the thing in itself; because society needs it; because it will make man’s work easier; because it needs to be done. This is true self-giving. They could be much more comfortable at a desk job, pushing papers, working 9 to 5, but instead, they go through all of this so that our lives will be better. This does not mean that they are perfect in their interpersonal relations, but if they do not have a well-developed personhood, their task will be much harder, because no one will want to work with them.

So let us all examine ourselves from the viewpoint of the epitaph. How do you want to be remembered? “Here lies Fred—a mean, backstabbing, selfish, overbearing, arrogant, inhuman creep.” Or, “Here lies Fred—the most kind, generous, self-giving, hard-working, caring person one could ever meet.” The choice is yours.

This past week, President Obama forced the CEO of General Motors to resign. The real significance of this may be lost on most people. Some might say, “Well, if General Motors is not doing well, the CEO should be replaced.” The major difficulty with this is that this is a special power of the GM Board of Directors, not the President of the United States. Effectively, this makes President Obama the Board of Directors of General Motors, and any other company he wants to control, and makes the Board a mere figurehead. Slowly but surely, this is moving us to a fascist form of government. In fascism, the companies still exist, but the government tells them what to do. This was similar to Mercantilism, which was the predominant economic system in Europe from about the 1600s until 1800, more or less. Mercantilism was the system of economics that Adam Smith wrote against in his famous An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which most people shorten to the cryptic Wealth of Nations. Smith was trying to show that government control of business impoverishes nations. Instead, he posited “a system of natural liberty,” which allowed people to follow their natural pursuits, take on the risk of doing so, and allow the market, that is, the countless decisions of people, to decide the outcome. It was the realization of the truth that Smith expressed in his work that subsequently brought prosperity to countless nations.

Now we are returning to the old system, under a new guise. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner recently asked Congress to grant him unprecedented power to shut down any company that, in his opinion, is dangerous to the overall economy. Note that there are no specifics to this power—it would be at his discretion. For those who have read my blog entries “The Economics of Politics,” you can see that all of this is a grab for what politicians live for—power, and power alone. Politics attracts those kinds of people. When asked by a Congresswoman where in the Constitution he went to get justification for this type of power, Geithner expressed incoherent babbling. It did not seem ever to cross his mind that he needed Constitutional justification for such an assumption of power. Again, this is typical of fascism. A crisis is, if not created, then hyped, panic flamed up, and people in this panic are willing to trade their freedom for security. Only too late will they realize that the situation was not as bad as the self-interested government officials portrayed it. The power will have been granted, and only a miracle will pry it away from the hands of the government. Once taken, government almost always keeps a power.

Getting back to General Motors, its problems go all the way back to government-imposed protective tariffs, which are a remnant of Mercantilism. Corporations seek to be protected from foreign competition so they do not have to work to keep up. The government, bowing to pressure and false economic theories, puts tariffs and quotas on imports to raise their prices higher than those of the domestic product; in this case, cars. The car makers then can do whatever they want because consumers face a choice of either us or nothing. In the 1970s, when we began allowing imports, the American car companies were caught, and almost went out of business. They finally got their act together when a new wave of government regulation on cars was imposed, thus raising the cost of domestic cars. To boot, the latest situation is that the Federal government is dictating to the car companies what types of cars to make, all in an effort to be “green.” The problem is that the market does not want these cars, so the company is forced to spend millions on cars they cannot sell. Then the government says, “Oh, it would be terrible if the companies failed; so many would be put out of work. So we have to bail them out again, and since we are ponying up the money, we now have a controlling interest in them, we can call the shots, we can tell the company what to produce, we can fire the executives, and when the company comes in with a loss, we blame the company again, bail them out again . . . .” And the circle continues. Remember, this government is the same one that has brought us the Post Office, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the public school system. All those who believe that the government can bring us out of a recession should remember that it was the government that caused it in the first place. Remember the housing bubble?

What a racket!