OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

My mother, back in the late 60's, once made the comment, "I don't know why the government has to waste all that money, shooting it into space." My mother sometimes had a cryptic way of speaking, but I knew what she meant.

Of course, we know that all kinds of benefits have come about from those early space shots (like GPS, better weather forecasts, satellite dishes, cell phones, etc.). And for years I didn't think much about what she said. After all, she was just a little old lady by that time and didn't understand that all that money was actually spent here on earth, providing companies profit and people jobs.

Later, however, I got thinking about her question, not in terms of whether the money spent on space shots was well spent, but how the thought of the money as being "shot into space" influenced her (and other people's) attitude. To her spending money to send rockets into space was about the same as taking the money and burning it. And, of course, that's the way most people think of at least some of the government's spending.

During my adult life I've lived through about thirty years when the government ran a deficit and about ten when it ran a surplus. Now we're back to deficits. To be honest with you, I haven't seen a whole lot of difference over the whole 45 years as far as how it affects my daily life.

Sure, there have been times of wild inflation, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with the deficit, but more from a panic mentality over worry about the future. All it took to cure it was getting someone in power whom the people trusted to "fix" things. And he certainly DIDN'T do it by lowering the deficit, just the opposite, as a matter of fact.

There have been period of high unemployment and low unemployment, but, again, those periods seemed to have more to do with other, outside forces. Most of them were inevitable, no matter what the monetary policy of the government.

We've just gone through a recession, my own son was out of work for over a year, I've worried about my own job. It's easy for Democrats to blame the Republicans who have just taken over. And it's easy for us to blame them, judging from our limited view. It's easy for the Republicans to blame the Democrats, who were in power immediately before the recession. And it's easy for us to blame them, judging from our limited view.

Actually, if I were to venture a guess, I'd say the recession had more to do with the panic reaction to 9/11 combined with the burst of the dot.com bubble and businesses' reaction in hiring and firing to a successful transition of the Y2K problem, plus about a hundred other factors. Just my thoughts.

Whatever party is not in power when there is a deficit is constantly railing about how bad it is for our economy. The ones in power keep saying it's not harmful. I think most of us try to judge it from our individual viewpoint, like looking at our revenues & expenditures, our household budgets. But they're not the same. Whole different rules.

For example, suppose you decided to only work part time instead of full time. Your revenues would fall, your budget would go into the red, and eventually you're in real trouble.

But, suppose the government cuts the tax rates, their revenues fall, people have more money and either spend it or invest it, both of which creates more jobs, which raises the nation's incomes on which taxes are collected, and eventually revenues rise back up. See, two different results, two different set of rules, micro-economics vs. macro-economics.

Let's look at the deficits themselves. In general, there are two ways for a government to "handle" a deficit. One is to borrow the money, which means they will eventually have to pay it back, or at least the interest. We, as individuals, can do the same thing but eventually the interest we pay destroys any chance we have of getting ahead. For the government, it's different, especially when interest rates are low.

We've seen that how many people are refinancing their homes because interest rates are low. Why shouldn't the government also take advantage of these low interest rates and borrow more money now rather than later when interest rates might be higher?

For them, this borrowing helps keep the banks and other loaners in business, which keeps employment high and raises profits, all of which end up being taxed, so the government collects more.

There's an old adage that when a dollar bill changes hands 7 times, the government owns it, and that includes when the government is one of the hands. The faster the government can get the money circulating, the better off it is for them.

The second way is to simply print more money, an option which is surely not available to us with our own budgets. But for the government this has the effect of lowering the value of the dollar in comparison with the other currencies of the world, which makes our products more competitive on the world market, which leads to higher profits, and more taxes AND makes it so the government can pay those interest charges on the borrowed amounts with "cheaper" money.

Now, let's look at a surplus in the same light. The true situation is that the government is taking in more money than they need. When we do that we either spend it or we put it in the bank, trying to provide for our future when we'll have no income.

So, looking at those options and extending them to the government, it might increase its spending or "invest" the surplus.

If they increase their spending, we don't really have a surplus. And they don't "invest" it in the way we think of it because the government doesn't have savings accounts. Because they don't have a time in the future when they will have no income, they don't need to save for a rainy day. Remember, they're not a profit organization, and putting their excess into a bank is probably the least productive thing they could do with it.

If we had so many years of surplus under Clinton, where's the money? In what bank? Invested in what stocks? You see, they don't invest.

Because the government is the one who prints the money, it's really sort of like monopoly money for them. It's a way of keeping score, but you can only judge by the condition of the country whether the government is collecting and spending its money wisely.

When we say "the President did this and caused that to happen," I usually just smile. Like the legislature has no responsibility for what happens? Like business has no responsibility? Like each one of us has no responsibility? Like one man flips a switch and throw the country into a tailspin? It's a lot more complicated than that.

And when we try to judge what going to happen or what has already occurred based on our position, our small share of the world, our limited perspective, we are inevitably led to the wrong conclusions.

My final conclusion is that the federal budget really isn't my responsibility and I'm only going to worry about it in as far as I can ascertain that it affects me. And that's pretty limited (my ascertainment, that is). If they raise taxes, I'm going to be more unhappy. If they lower them, I'm going to be happier. Other than that, it's just too complicated for me to figure out what affected my future, how much, and what would have been a better plan.

Remember, regardless of what they do, you're the one who has to handle your problems, and expecting the government to somehow make it "all right" for us is just wasted expectation.