Noble has a heart-to-heart talk with the Tea Party

Hello, My name is Noble Collins.

I know many of you here, and I’m pleased to say I’m actually friends with
a few. I appreciate you giving me a moment to speak.

First, along with many others, I congratulate the Tea Party for finally, after many, many years getting Congress to pay attention to what ordinary people are saying. If this country is going to be OF the people, BY the people and FOR the people, then it must include the voice of ALL the people.

As we are all aware, this is one of the most crucial periods in American history. It’s my opinion that this next few weeks and coming year will determine whether, as Lincoln called it, “the last, best hope of man,” can endure.

There is one important thing that we all agree on – the United States is very deeply in debt, and it can’t survive unless the huge deficits and unbalanced spending are brought under control. For far too many years, our representatives in Congress have ignored that fact and have refused to wrestle with a common sense approach toward correcting the problem.

The U.S. is like a heroin addict who has to take more and more drugs just to function. Sooner or later, of course, the drugs will kill him. I have to ask, though, if there are any doctors here? If you had a patient under your care that had a severe drug addiction problem, would you prescribe Cold Turkey? Taking the patient immediately off drugs and expecting him to be cured the next day is not only unrealistic, it most likely would kill him, isn’t that right? The best approach would be to slowly get the patient off the drugs and begin a program to prevent him from becoming a repeat offender, right?

Well a close correlation can be made, I believe, with the U.S. and the debt ceiling. We all know we have a huge problem. Finally, with the help of the Tea Party, people who can do something about it are admitting to the problem. That’s a big first step for an addict – a huge accomplishment for the Tea Party.

To take the drastic immediate step of pulling the country out of debt by ignoring the debt and going cold turkey, however, will have the almost certain effect of killing the patient.

The debt ceiling doesn’t represent new spending. It is money we owe for previous spending. We have been on a credit card spree, and now we have to pay the bill. If we refuse to pay the bill we only make things worse for ourselves. When you stop paying the mortgage, the bank forecloses. When you stiff your creditors, they have all kinds of ugly ways of trying to get their money. In the end, we would do far better admitting our problem and putting in place a program to work out of it.

Our creditors would prefer this. The last thing they want is for us to forfeit the debt and not be able to pay anything. Then, they are stuck with nothing.

Paying interest-only for a while, as you work to improve your situation, is a time-honored way of working with creditors. Raising the debt limit, along with a sound plan for drastically cutting back our lifestyle (future spending) will eventually pull us out of this crisis. Millions of families are doing just that today in order to save their homes. Where banks are willing, sound plans are being put in place for re-financing and saving the home. Where debtors are willing to work out a plan, ways are being found to keep the homestead.

Simply refusing to deal with the situation solves nothing and helps no one. In fact, it only makes a bad thing much worse.

I strongly urge you to back a plan to mandate debt reduction for the U.S. government. A broadly based independent commission, has studied the problem and recommended just that.

The patient can be cured. Strong medicine can do it.

Raising the present debt ceiling is not the same thing as authorizing more spending. Please understand that. This money has already been spent.  We just never had it, so we promised to borrow it when the bill came due.

When times are good, it’s easy to think they will always be good. When a great challenge comes along, it’s easy to believe we will just answer the challenge and worry about paying for it later. We have done that too often.

As distasteful as it certainly is, we have to own up to past mistakes and begin a sound program for avoiding this kind of mess again.

Please encourage your congressman to allow raising the present debt ceiling.

Refusing to do so will eliminate any good opportunity for recovery. It will only make things far worse.

As physicians to the debt junkie, we should “First, do no harm.”

Working together, we can make sure this never happens again.

Thank you.

(Watch tomorrow for a brand new and much anticipated wine column from Noble.)