Life Lessons

As you grow older, you become more self assured, knowledgeable and more independent – able to make many decisions on your own. At some point in your teenage years, you may come to believe in your infallibility, and how correct you are in all things. As you get older, life has a way of teaching you new lessons, and if we were smart and true to ourselves there were probably lessons that our parents tried to teach us many years before and we were too smart at the time to listen. When you become a parent, you come to realize many more of those lessons after the fact. One big lesson for parents is that you can’t make decisions for your children all of the time, for one they won’t always listen, and two – they need to learn on their own. You try to protect them from the things that will really hurt them or having lasting effects, but sometimes a little blood and skinned knees can be way more instructive than any parental chat.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Mark Twain

Wisdom of the Mom: What we can learn from mothers

One lesson we learned, and we didn’t even realize we were being taught, was the “You Slice, You Choose” game. The “game” was simple, usually there was something desirable like a Pie and your mother would designate one person to slice, and another person to got to choose which slice to take. Simple, but devious – at first glance without a lot of thought a young lad may think if I get to slice, I can slice a bigger piece of the pie. A wiser, more experienced child will realize that any deviation by the slicer from the center was a gain for them as they would invariably choose the larger slice. Overtime, as everyone knew the game the slices became more and more even, and the “game” self enforced fairness without any policing or intervention from parental units. After a while, you could swear that each slice was done by a computer aided laser in the planning and precision of the pie slice so perfectly even down the middle. Many years later, you marvel at the wisdom of mothers and wonder what other ancient mysteries and riddles could these geniuses have solved if their life mission wasn’t wasted helping you slice pie.

Mom and the Budget

Every year now it seems like the Federal Budget is now in play as a game piece to be negotiated by both parties trying to gain advantage over each other. Even though everyone knows the dates and when the deadline is, it always seems to go right up to the end, and in this case over the deadline. Such is the case in the partisan environment we live in today. However, I’m struck that it’s really nothing more than a high stakes game of “You Slice, You Choose.” That may over simplify it by quite a bit, but the fundamentals are the same.

Pie Analogy

Our Federal Revenue is the ingredients for the pie. Our Federal budget is the size of the pie. Some years the pie will be larger than what you can eat, known as a budget surplus, and you can put some in the fridge for later. Other years you can borrow extra ingredients to have a bigger pie now at the expense of smaller pies in later years, known as a budget deficit. Much like pies in our household, there was never enough. Since 1901 we’ve had 92 years of budget deficits.

Our debt keeps growing, as well as the interest on the debt. Each year eating more and more pie.

Pie Dynamics

Before you even slice the pie, you realize several pie dynamics are at play. The amount of ingredients each year, the more ingredients the bigger the pie – so as Revenue grows, so does the size of the pie. The size of pie we make is dependent on the quantity of ingredients we have, and if we choose to leave some pie for later (surplus), or we decide to borrow ingredients from the future (deficits) with the potential consequence of having to reduce the size of future pies.

Pie Slicing

After you understand the pie dynamics, you can begin the process of slicing. However, before you slice you want to have any idea of how you want to divvy up the pie, and knowing with the Federal Budget almost 3/4’s (74%) of the pie is already gone before you slice it allocated to Mandatory and Net Interest components. The Net interest is all the extra pie we had in previous years. The more we add to the deficit, the larger it get. As it keeps growing, the smaller and smaller the pie available is in the future. Unless new laws are passed, the debate is in the quarter of the pie designated as Discretionary. However, even many of those don’t feel discretionary like National Defense – you could cut it back, but you probably aren’t going to eliminate it.

Pie – Choosing your Slice

So the only thing left is tough choices. Slicing can be a painful process, because when it comes time to choose – you realize that something you may have wanted more of shrunk, and something you wanted less of grew and you are stuck with that choice. Unlike in the family edition of the “You Slice, You Choose” game, both parties participate in the slicing and choosing. There is no self reinforcing fairness mechanism other than the active participation of engaged and informed citizens. This is the game Congress must play each year.

Pie in the Sky

Increasingly, people bring up MMT (Modern Monetary Theory). Using our pie analogy, according to MMT as long as inflation is in check, your pie can be as big as you want it to be. We wish these Economists were available to instruct our parents. Alas, in our household there was no magic infinitely growing pie, just tough choices. Until such time as an infinite pie becomes available, we’ll have to face touch choices as a country.

Summary

The Federal Budget is much more complicated, and the outcomes and consequences much more serious than a game of “You Slice, You Choose” but the lessons from Mom are none the less instructive. We all have to choose between tough choices, we all have to make reasonable assumptions and trade offs, and create mechanisms for fairness and balance that reinforce themselves automatically and fairly. In the game of life understanding Government Financial Literacy gives us the tools to understand the rules of the game, how to participate, and understand the dynamics, and trade offs that must be made in order for all of us to thrive. We learn many lessons in life, some of them stick with you. Thanks mom, I miss you every day.