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| ..........Congress and the Administration are stuck over the year 2000 budget. Forget that they've been working on it for 13 months now. Forget that they may shut down if they don't sign one continuing resolution after another to keep going—a situation that has never shut them down before. If Bob Franken and Wolf Blitzer say it can happen, then it probably can, anything's possible, and a cow will jump over the moon someday. Let's concentrate on the real problem. ..........The federal government has almost $2 trillion in tax receipts to spend during this fiscal year. Of course, about half of it was collected for specific entitlements. Without argument, it is supposed to be used only for the benefit of these entitlements, committed to services due or to be enhanced and included in the government's "unified budget" only as a matter of simplified and deceptive accounting. Oh well, there's still a trillion left to work with. ..........Oops, we've got to pay the interest on the national debt. This interest is now running more than one billion dollars a day, 365 days of the year, weekends and holidays included. We don't dare miss any annual payments due to the citizens and other countries that have loaned us a grand total of $5.6 trillion in the last twenty years or so. We all agreed to pay these people annual interest until their loans matured. And after all, if we didn't pay these | |||||||