My thoughts keep returning to a town hall meeting held in Lostine May 30 where U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was the speaker.

Sen. Merkley covered many topics that day, most of them of prime importance to Wallowa County residents.

Topics he touched upon included the unavailability of funding to maintain, at anywhere near current levels, a National Guard aerial search program designed to detect Mexican drug cartel operations growing marijuana on national forests, a problem in Wallowa County; the mystery why gas prices were continuing to rise while supply was high and demand down; a $500 million bill passed by Congress to establish work for displaced timber workers, a bill that included $7.1 million earmarked for such workers in Oregon that resulted in not one Oregonian hired to perform the work; and the recent Supreme Court decision that removes any ceiling on how much money a corporation or individual, either domestic or foreign, can spend to influence a presidential election.

None of these warnings of the times, Id think, is palatable to the common American ear, but another topic Merkley mentioned in passing might be the most alarming of all.

Its a topic that arises so commonly that we Americans regularly turn deaf ears to it.

How can I have any impact on our national debt, which totaled $15 trillion in October of last year? Our national debt is 20 percent of the combined gross national product of every country in the world, and it stands to reason there will come a time when the USA will have to toe the line and pay the piper.

In Sen. Merkleys May 30 address in tiny little Lostine, Ore., population 213, he hinted that time could come sooner than we might think.

He said in Lostine that, unless a new national budget is agreed to before the current budget expires a daunting task for a Congress so steeped in partisanship that drastic measures will be enacted.

And those drastic measures, said Merkley, would entail across-the-board, 50-percent budget cuts at every level of the U.S. government.

Can you imagine the immediate ramifications were the U.S. defense budget halved overnight?

Of course this wont happen and Im just being an alarmist. Right?

Congress will find a way and well continue to fill our cars with $4 gas, barbecue steaks on summer holidays, and bury our noses in televised dramas and sports, all the time turning to Facebook to learn whats new.

A friend sent an e-mail that offers some perspective on our, or should I say this nations financial crunch.

Lets begin with the figure of $1 billion. If you neatly stacked $100 bills chest-high multiple times to fill a standard ISO/Military sized pallet, it would take more than 10 such pallets to hold $1 billion.

Trying another form of visualization, if you were to spend $1 million each day from the day Jesus was born until now, that only would amount to about $700 billion, the amount the U.S. government invested to bail out floundering banks in the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2010.

The chest-high ISO-Military pallets filled with stack after stack of $100 bills would cover the area of a football field were one to group $1 trillion in such a manner.

And our national debt is 15 times more than that?

Warren Buffet says theres a simple solution to the problem: dont let any politicians run for a second term until the U.S. budget is balanced.

It might take more than a bipartisan Congress to enact that bill!!!