By ESTHER RAMOS

Where is it? What does it mean? How do you know when it’s been exceeded? Can it be exceeded? Or breached? Our lovely governing quorums continue to “raise” our national debt ceiling. How in the world can they do that?

Can we do this raising of the ceiling in our own personal lives? All I can say is just go out and try it. Be my guest. And good luck.

Let’s say you are a normal regular family with mom and dad and 2.2 children, and your combined earnings for a calendar year is around $72,000. Now let’s say your mortgage, two car payments, VISA and Master Cards, motorcycle, insurances (health and life and homeowners and auto), FICA, Social Security, Medicare, household utilities (both phones, cable, internet, trash, exterminator, water softener, gas, gasoline, electricity, water, etc.), orthodontist, (yes, dear, Junior inherited that unfortunate Uncle’s overbite), extra gas for Junior’s car, school clothes, and perhaps some food and a modest 401k almost come out of that $72,000. Not quite. You’re still using your credit card. Even IF the roof would hold until the place is paid off, you dread the look of any grey clouds, until one day you decide to bite the bullet, raise your debt ceiling, and apply for a home improvement loan.

You’ve dotted all of your “I”s and crossed all of your “T”s. You’ve been living right. All of your payments have been made on time. You even prayed for a favorable outcome to your credit check.

No! The answer is no. No loan. But why? It’s because you owe and pay out in the span of a year, a little more than you take in as assets within that same year. So your “credit” will not allow for a loan. Period. That’s your ceiling. You already pay out more than you earn. You’re earnings are your gross domestic product. Your G.D.P. You’d be a bad credit risk for all of your debt if you owed a dime more to anybody else. That’s where our nation is today.

Now, that being said, how would one raise one’s debt ceiling if this were to happen? This can be done in one of two ways: pay off one of your loans so you own more product, like a car or motorcycle. Or go out and get an additional job, so you take in more dollars.

However, as an entity, we’ve become so comfortable with being a favored nation among the countries around the world, that we’re not required to pay our debts, and, so far, nobody’s called our bluff. So we OWE! And one country we owe is China. Yes the Chinese have bought some of our “paper” as it were. They hold a lien against our country. What? That wasn’t on the news? Not even a little bit. But that’s what the national debt is. The debt is what we owe.

So if you pay off one credit card with a different credit card you have rising interests on both of them increasing your debt without increasing your stuff. That’s your deficit. Our Chinese credit card is what we use to pay our Senior Citizens, federal jobs, Medicaid, etc., etc.

So here’s how they raise the debt ceiling, and I’ll use you as an example again. You send an e-mail over to the office who handles your VISA card account, and you say that your roof’s leaking and you can’t afford to fix it so you’re raising your credit limit up to $22,000 to accommodate this unexpected cost. Thanking them kindly for their understanding and support, you send it off.

Now I ask: How successful would this be? Would they do this for you?

Well, that’s exactly how it’s done governmentally but with trillions of your children’s dollars instead of thousands of yours.

Are you uncomfortable yet? I can only hope so.