Today, October 15th, is day number 13 of our US federal government shutdown. I have not seen much immediate effect close by me from the shutdown, but I do know that the national parks in Northern California, including Yosemite and the new Pinnacles Monument, have been closed. (Poor Yosemite, first a fire and now a shutdown). Maybe more government services will be discontinued soon.

I understand from one source that in two days, October 17th, the US government will stop paying on money owed. Here we go with more of this abstract money talk that I was writing about only yesterday. One way the government gets money from outside sources is to sell treasury bills (T-Bills), which are agreements that if the buyer buys the T-Bills from the government, the government will pay back the full amount over a short period of time to the buyer, with some added extra money as well, called interest. T-Bills have been known for many years to be a safe place to put your money if you have no further ambitions than to receive the small interest gain that they produce. If the US Government should stop paying back the money owed on T-Bills, it will apparently send a shock wave of uneasiness throughout the world of money. That is supposed to be the most rock-solid place on earth to store your money. Federal bonds are pretty much the same thing, only take longer to mature so that you may redeem them.

I don't normally write about such things in my journal as money because, as poet Robert Graves wrote: "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." Today, however, money, or the fear of it flying away in big chunks, like a quickly-melting iceberg, is on the minds of many. During my working years I was busy earning money by doing my job five days a week. I didn't have to worry as much about how and where my extra money was being stored. Now that I am retired and I rely mostly on a fixed income, a fixed amount of money that comes to me from out of storage, a reserve of money called Social Security, each month.

I have little problem yet with the fixed supply of money that comes to me and 58 million other Americans, but the source of this money is the US government, and the pot of money it controls is the same pot from which the T-Bill money may soon stop flowing. Many besides myself suspect that the T-Bill problem may soon spread even wider, perhaps slopping over into Social Security payments. To understand the dynamics of our modern money system requires constant and diligent study. Much human greed and unchecked ambition enters into the inner workings of the system, as well as a lot of misinformation and misinterpretation. Many have just given up trying to understand it all in much depth, and turn control of money and savings over to counselors and institutions. That's what I did because of lack of confidence in my own understanding, and natural lack of self-control.

The money system is full of tricksters, perhaps more of them than ever. The news is filled with stories about corporate executives lying and cheating. We have whistle blowers, websites, and watchdog societies that look for these criminals, but I sense that more are getting away with their crimes than those that are being caught. Money criminals become ingenious, or bold, or both, and the public can hardly keep track of who did what and when they did it.

The conventional money wisdom that I grew up with sprung from my ancestors. Their wisdom is now becoming forgotten or severely diluted. It went something like this: Unless you were disabled, you worked for a living and paid into a retirement plan. Only two things in life were then purchased by borrowing money: a car and a house. Most people scorned credit cards and mistrusted bankers because of the huge money losses during the Great Depression. The mortgage on your house was 25% of your annual income. It was culturally acceptable that women need not work unless they wanted to, so one income per household paid all living expenses. If you could save extra money and worked hard, you could retire early, and society deemed you successful. If you were not careful, and you lived beyond on your means, the conventional wisdom said that you might be miserable in your old age, so most people lived carefully and avoided borrowing money or using credit cards when it was not essential.

Social Security money was your money. You paid into the plan for a life time, and had no choice because it was automatically removed from your pay check. The government was then supposed to put that money into a special storage place and let it grow there for years. Forty years of growth would produce a nice chunk of money for your older years.

As with many money matters and with the government, there has been much confusion over how the government has been handling the Social Security money it receives from workers. The government website for Social Security explains that the money was never moved anywhere for any different spending purposes, as many like myself have mistakenly believed, but has been put into a different budget. At one time it was part of the government's one single big budget, and so was part of an "online budget". In 1990 the money was removed from that budget and placed into an "offline budget". The website further explains that the handling of funds has never changed since Social Security began in 1939, but the accounting for those funds has changed.

The money I have been paying into Social Security has not been receiving compound interest, so I am not the multi-millionaire that I should be. No matter what budget or accounting method the government has used over the years, I sense some carefully planned mismanagement of the money, for me and for about 58 million more like me. Some politicians say that we should abolish the Social Security system or turn it over to private enterprise, where it could be better managed. Banks and financial institutions have a history of making other peoples' money disappear, so that idea has not been unanimously embraced either.

The number of people in the country is growing who will need money to live on in their old age when they can no longer work. With a broken or dysfunctional system in place, the streets of America will become full of old beggars. I write about these things today not to suggest improvements, but only for my own better understanding. I find, however, that the more I understand, the more questions arise. Meanwhile, I hope that October 17th passes with no damage done to the money system we have in place.