01/20/2006

Margaret Elizabeth Taylor was a 98-year-old woman who died last November. Her estate was worth just over a million dollars. Her husband had died twenty-five years ago, and she had no living siblings or children. The big question: who received her estate?

The federal government, of course. In her will, she bequeathed her entire fortune to the government and asked that it be used to pay down the national debt.

Although generous and most certainly original, I suspect that million dollars pays for a few minutes of interest on our $8.1 trillion debt. Shame.