Daily News Sun
Thursday November 15, 2007
Climbing debt may rile Americans
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic”. The same principle, that the public can more easily grasp a small tragedy than a huge one, can be applied to budget matters. Americans can get rightly riled about a public official who misuses several thousand of their hard earned dollars, but it’s harder to get them riled about more massive abuses. A thousand bucks is a tragedy, whereas trillions of dollars are too hard to comprehend, let alone to get angry over. Well Americans better learn to get angry soon, given that the federal debt has now hit over $9 trillion, which is a heck of a lot of money, even by government standards. The debt which includes obligations such as T-bonds, T-bills and T-notes, has soared from$5.6 trillion when George W. Bush took office. The president so far has pushed to increase the debt limit five times during his presidency, making the current debt limit $9.8 trillion. At current trends, especially with the rate of spending to fund the Iraq war, it won’t be too long before President Bush is asking to increase that limit again.
When will it stop? The annual budget deficit also is a problem, although $163 billion dollars sounds tiny compared with numbers followed by a dozen zeroes. These numbers reflect an amazing amount of red ink., a testament to the way the federal government continues to grow and to the way politicians, especially Republicans recognize no bounds to the amount of money the government can borrow and spend. It’s ironic that although rhetorically speaking, the Democratic Party is the party of big government, in reality the Republican Party at the national level has proved itself to be the true party of bigger and more expensive government.
The Libertarian Party noted, in a statement released Thursday, “It took from George Washington to Ronald Reagan for the national debt to reach the $1 trillion mark, a period of more than 190 years. Now 27 years later, the national debt has risen more than 800 percent under three Republicans and one Democrat president. However only $1.2 trillion of national debt was accrued during President Bill Clintons administration, meaning the bulk of the national debt comes from Republican administrations.
It’s about time for candidates in the two major parties to stop making promises about how much more of your money they want to spend and start outlining serious plans to rein in the deficit and the debt.
( PS. Didn't Bush initially say he estimated the Iraq war to cost only $84 billion?)
