The Real Debt Limit

Once, on a lark, having invested wisely in a rank outsider and feeling rather boompsy-daisy in consequence, I LOLed my way through what they call a career aptitude test.

If you know to which I refer, I need not explain further, but for those of my readers who say, “eh, what? Never heard of such a thing!” a career aptitude test is a Rube Goldberg version of a horoscope, if you know what I mean. The procedure is as follows: one answers a number of offensively personal questions and then based on something or other one is told in which field of human endeavor one would go from strength to strength like a devouring flame. Of purely academic interest in my case, of course, having pots of the stuff already, but as noted earlier in this little morceau I was feeling fizzy.

At some other time I will share my frankly absorbing answers to the questions, but at this particular moment having some pressing personal matters to attend to, viz., I hear the Great Outdoors calling me to wander tunelessly and whistle aimlessly in a park, or rather the other way around, I shall skip the intermediaries and proceed directly to the results. To wit, I was advised in the strongest possible terms not to pursue employment as a boffin, nerd, expert, or anything of the description. My strengths, it appears, are more in the ornamental line. Uncanny how these things know. The Wooster is rather turned out. If it weren’t conceit, the things I could tell you about the little lady’s observations on the Wooster tie knot. . . . but I wander. The point, or res if you prefer, is that even my closest friends and warmest admirers are hardly heating up my Google page rank with frequent links to the Wooster Mensa page.

So it is in my character of a simple subject of the crown, untutored in the ways of finance and the rude vigor of American politics, that I diffidently suggest that all this healthy give and take and rumpus between my pals in Congress and my chum President Bracky about the debt limit whatsit, while doubtless invigorating, sails about a country mile wide of the point. The real debt limit, peraventure–and withal, perhaps, the real item for public concern–is the big bang-up; the crash; the what if they gave a bond offering and no one showed up; the touchee who won’t be touched. As Bingo put it mournfully to me once, eventually you run out of other people’s money.

I made these observations to Jeeves and he replied “rem acu tetigisti,” which is a Latin gag meaning “golly, you got it, governor,” or in the dialect of the internet bloods, “+1!”. So its the goods.