What if a typical family spent like the federal government? It'd be a very weird family.

Brad Plumer:

The idea here seems to be that the U.S. government is taking on a lot of debt. True, the typical American family also takes on lots of debt through mortgages and the like -- the median debt burden is about $70,000 -- but U.S. government borrowing is even more massive than that.

Fair enough. This analogy seems incomplete, though. We should take it further. If the typical family -- let's call them the Smiths -- really did spend like the federal government, a few other things would also be true:

-- The Smiths would spend 20 percent of their budget, or $12,800 each year, on an arsenal of guns, tanks and drones to defend their house against threats or to invade the occasional neighbor over lawn-pesticide disputes and access to the gas station.

-- The Smiths would spend another third of their income financing retirement and health care for Grandma and Grandpa. Part of that would have been prepaid by money that Grandma and Grandpa socked away while they were working, but some of it would be paid for by the parents and kids who are chipping in.

-- Actually, come to think of it, the Smiths spend nearly half their money -- 43 percent -- operating a massive insurance conglomerate whose main beneficiaries are family members.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 19, 2013 12:33 AM
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