Ross Perot made headlines when he said that the National Debt was like a crazy aunt we keep in the basement. “Everyone knows she’s there but no one wants to talk about her.”

A Crazy Uncle in the Attic is closer to the truth. His name is Uncle Sam.

According to the Department of Treasury my granddaughters were born owing more than $26,000, thanks to the National Debt. You owe that much too. So do each of your children, your parents, in fact, everyone in your family owes $26,000.

Greens want to know what our children are getting for their money. What benefits are our parents getting for this debt we are heaping onto future generations? How do our families come out when you do the math?

Our children are not all getting a top-notch education. 40% or more of our students don’t graduate from high school, much less college. Our parents can’t walk into their doctor’s offices without having to think about the cost. Our parents are treated like a number on a balance sheet. Short run profits guide most business decisions. To government and corporate money handlers, our children are like our parents, just numbers to add up and divide.

Our families are not getting cleaner air, mass transit or decentralized renewable energy supplies. Otherwise, we might feel some justification in leaving this terrible burden for future generations.

We voted ourselves a tax increase to widen roads, the “Pennies for Progress” plan. Democrats and Republicans who run local government have a “Development at all costs” attitude. Now we see that the widened roads are not wide enough to handle the flood of new cars hitting the street from new sub-divisions. We are told time and again that growth pays for itself, leading to lower taxes down the road. We’ve been down this road for a long time, and you don’t seem to be getting better services or lower prices.

Now, just what has this Crazy Uncle in the Attic done to get us into this terrible mess?

Republicans and Democrats have given tax cuts to the nation’s richest few. Locally the Town Council in Fort Mill granted a 50% tax reduction to the shareholders of Tenet, the company that owns Piedmont Hospital.

The Governor wants state tax breaks for our richest few. Doing the bare minimum for our children, parents and families seems to be the watchword for Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans and Democrats have buried us in a mountain of debt to pay for foreign wars, legal and illegal. Locally our schools are used for military recruitment and ROTC training. On the state level the prison-industrial complex pushes more of our own people into jail, running record profits for stockholders. All this takes dollars from your paycheck. City and county budgets reflect more of a military mindset than Greens would want. Fewer police and more teachers would be our usual approach, especially where non-violent “crimes” like drug possession are concerned.

There’s the corporate give aways that drain our pockets. With government patents given away free to drug companies, government land leased at a loss to corporate interests and tax dollars doled out to companies to train their work force, it’s surprising that we have anything left. But that’s the entire point! We don’t have anything left! The Republicans and Democrats took it all and wasted it.

And of course this doesn’t even begin to address the other debts we are leaving for future generations. We have left a debt of hundreds of thousands of tons of permanently poisonous nuclear waste from places like our own Catawba Nuclear Station. Air pollution and global climate change which may doom the entire planet to poverty or worse is not on the government or corporate balance sheets, as if these debts will never have to be paid.

So, with the Crazy Uncle in the Attic tossing around money like a ten-year-old in a candy store, what is the Green Party offering to do about it?

That’s hard to say because we’re not in control of many places. One place the Green Party is in control is Sabastapol, California. There the City Council and School Board have a Green Party majority. Next month: How do Greens Govern, or “Sleeping With the Enemy”.

Gregg Jocoy lives in Fort Mill and is Chair of the York County Greens. The Greens can be reached toll free at 1-877-282-2236, locally at 984-5414 or on the Internet at www.YorkGreens.com. The state Green Party convention is scheduled for June 18th. To attend call, or visit the website.