A Lesson in Basic Maths

The media has been in an uproar about David Cameron's move not to contribute any more British money to Euro bailouts and his dissatisfaction with new EU financial regulations. Mr. Cameron's stance is, of course, courageous and should be praised as much as a politician can be praised. Sadly, however, his veto will mean nothing in the long run. The Eurocrats have already declared that the new regulation will go into effect whether Britain wants it or not. The dictatorship from Brussels is out of hiding - they have gone public with their new Sovietesque ambitions. The British people do have a right to be offended by such actions on the part of the EU Commission. And the mainstream media has been harping on about this for the last couple days. But there is one item on this agenda which nobody has mentioned. Namely - the question of basic mathematics.
When the Eurozone is being bailed out, who is paying for it? The EU member states are paying. But where in the world are they getting this money from?! I was introduced to the concept of negative numbers back in first grade, and ever since then math has come in handy in my life on numerous occasions. So let's examine the financial situation of the EU member states. We can easily find on Wikipedia that every single European Union country in grossly indebted. This means that the overall balance sheet ends with a big "-" negative sign down on the bottom. And yet we are told these states will now pay into some Eurozone bailout fund! How in the world does that work?! A first grader can tell you that it is impossible to magically turn a negative sign into a positive sign! If that was allowed, the rules of mathematics would be null and void, and I should go find all my previous teachers and demand my record be changed so that I got a 100% correct score on every single math test I ever took in my life. Are our politicians really that badly educated? I guess public schools are to blame...

Not for the first time will I quote the following lines from Jefferson, for he said, and rightly so, that "the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."