These are tough times. Our government is spending money we don’t have and at an unsustainable rate that adds trillions of dollars to our national debt. These just aren’t meaningless numbers, they actually have consequences! Sooner rather than later the reckless spending will result in higher taxes for everyone and leverage our children to an uncertain future. We were supposed to leave our children with a better America than we had. Yet, even with all the warning signs and calls for reform, many people seem unaware of the impending doom or choose to ignore it.

So how much is a trillion dollars? Here are some amazing perspectives on what a trillion dollars is:

• Laid end-to-end, a trillion dollars worth of $1 bills would extend from the Earth to the Sun.

• You could spend a dollar per second for 32,000 years.

• If you asked for a trillion dollars at your bank in $100 bills, it would make a stack 800 miles high.

• A stack of one dollar bills totaling a trillion dollars would stand 74,000 miles high, or 30% of the distance to the Moon.

• It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.

• If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would have taken you until October 2737 to lose a trillion dollars.

Although grant funding supports our fleet initiatives, should we continue to ask for it knowing that the end result will most likely harm our future generation? For most of us, we grew up being told that we must live within our means. Unlike the Federal Government, it is illegal for us to write checks that we know we could never repay. When is enough, enough!

We all have some “skin in the game” but this time it is different. This time, we could bankrupt this country and leave our children to endless unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, European style taxation, and an America that is enslaved to other foreign countries.

Do any of you even know how debt is created on a national level? Do you know that in order for our government to bring money into the monetary system they must sell U.S. backed securities to foreign countries like China, Japan, and even some countries that particularly don’t like us. Those securities must be paid back, and with interest! Already there have been calls for the dollar to be replaced as the world’s reserve currency. Do you have any idea what that would do for the price of goods and services that we receive from foreign countries?

Our choice has never been clearer. We need to stop the needless spending before it’s too late, if it isn’t already. We need to find ways to live within our means and trim our budgets to cope with the new reality. I believe that America is just waking up to what is going on, but far too many are asleep at the wheel. We need to tell our politicians that we don’t want you to spend anymore of our money!

So with what you know now, should we still ask for more grant money?