Failure

How do you feel about failure? Is it important to experience? What happens if we are kept from experiencing it? Will we ever learn?

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” That quote is attributed to Colin Powell, someone who publicly supported our current U.S. president during the election. Another person who would be president, Robert Francis Kennedy, said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

We have a great challenge facing us in this country right now: fixing the economy. Should government act like parents who won't allow their “little angels” to fail and continue to enable bad behavior? Does a democracy that believes in capitalism do that? Or is it a socialist government that acts that way? Yes, failure is tough to get through, but if we learn from it we'll come out ahead on the other side. If we never learn we'll continue to repeat history, making the same mistakes over and over again as long as someone is there to enable us.

And if mommy and daddy government is willing to enable bad behavior--once, twice, three times--when does it stop? The first bailout was over 700 billion dollars. The current plan is in the neighborhood of $800 billion. And now Timothy Franz Geithner, the current United States Secretary of the Treasury, has proposed another $1.5 trillion (that's trillion with a “T”) bailout. All told, that's over $3,000,000,000,000!

That figure equates to every penny the government takes in for a year and a half. But we can't shut down the government for a year and a half (as interesting of an idea as that may be) in order to repay that debt. So let's look at it another way, the way many of us pay for things we want: by saving up before we spend, spend, spend.

We are currently living in the year AD 2009. Since there is no AD 0, that means that since our current reckoning of time 2,008 years have passed. So if we tried during all that time to save up enough money to cover the $3T bill, it would have required putting aside $1,494,023,904.38 (~$1.5 billion) per year or $124,501,992.03 (~$124.5 million) per month or $28,731,228.93 (~$28.7 million) per week or $4,090,414.52 (~$4 million) every day! So how long will it take us to pay all that back, especially with interest involved? And that's only if mommy and daddy stop enabling after three times. But let's look on the bright side of not worrying about the consequences of covering up errors. Once the details of Secretary Geithner's plan come out maybe it will include no penalties if we fail to pay our taxes.