Will The Government Shut Down Tonight?

When I was a kid, which is when Eisenhower was President, every year for my birthday my parents would give me a United States Savings Bond as a birthday present, and my father would tell me that I needed to ‘make sure’ I held onto this bond because it represented financial security for me when it would be redeemed,

I had absolutely no idea what the words ‘financial security’ meant because I was ten years old and had never felt financially insecure in my life.

Of course, I was also born after the Depression had ended whereas my parents had lived through a time when there actually were Americans who faced each day not knowing if they would have anything to eat.

Now we use phrases like ‘food insecurity’ or ‘caloric insufficiency’ but when I taught at Berkeley in1975–76, my next-door neighbor was this old guy who had come out to California from somewhere in the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s and he used to talk about how they abandoned the family farm because otherwise they really thought they would starve.

By the time the Depression ended in 1939, the federal government owed some $40 billion, which climbed to $245 billion by 1945 in order to pay for military supplies used by us and our allies during World War II.