The late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen used to quip, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." Nowadays substitute a trillion for a billion, and boy are you ever talking real money.

How much is a trillion? If you started counting out one dollar bills at the rate of a $1 bill per second, day and night with no breaks, 24 hours a day, starting at the time of Moses to the current day, you would still have 27,000 years to go. Yes, 27,000! It takes approximately 30,000 years to count just 1 trillion dollar bills. Yet our national debt is $16 trillion, and rising every second.

How on Earth are we going to pay back the $16 trillion national debt? The numbers are mind-numbing. This reckless spending and borrowing saps the savings of a nation and leaves almost nothing available for private sector investments in plants and equipment.

Mom and Pop businesses are competing with the federal government for investment dollars and are losing. As a matter of fact, car title loan places and pawn shops have become President Barack Obama's new banking system for what used to be the middle class. Obama's plan to borrow our way to prosperity is nothing short of ludicrous.

Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt in his first term alone and has little to show for this deficit spending. Sidewalks that no one uses, curbs and gutters that no one wants, roads and bypasses that go from nowhere and end up nowhere do not create much economic growth!

The Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan economic plan, while not going far enough, at least recognizes that there is a problem, unlike the current resident in the White House, who is living in some economic La-La-Land.

Gary E. Neighbors

Locust Grove