The National Debt is Now $17 Trillion and Counting

While smoke, mirrors and thunder sticks are being used to distract our attention from the walking nightmare called, “business as usual” in Congress our national debt has now reached $17 Trillion dollars.  To give you some clue as to how big that is, let me simply tell you that $10,000 in Benjamins could be carried in your pocket, $1 million could be carried in a plastic grocery bag, a trillion dollars in $100 bills would need acres of pallets, each stacked with bills taller than the average man (that would be 5’10” plus an extra 8” for their pride).   There is really no explaining this kind of money, but we can look at the percentages and try to make some sense of it all.

There is a line in The Music Man that says, “There are burglars in the bedroom while you are fiddlin’ in the parlor.”  Well the media is fiddling with every issue pertaining to our latest governmental fiasco (at the behest of the Congress who wants attention on anything except themselves) while our elected representatives have raised the debt ceiling to $17,000,000,000,000. All of the commentary about Obamacare and Republican in-fighting is irrelevant to the train wreck that is coming down the tracks toward us.

The Washington Post tried to defend the raising of our debt ceiling by showing how much and how often it has been raised in the 33 years since Jimmy Carter took office.  Their sixth grade justification (“Well, he did it first!”) for our current weight of debt was terrifying by what it dismissed.  The article, long on graph and short on text, justified the debt as something that had been done by all presidents, regardless of party.  Past performance became precedent for current continuation.  That is like saying that if I over ate once, there is no reason to diet. 

Anyone who has raised children has heard this before.  “All my friends can stay out after midnight.”  If all you want to do is look at who broke curfew, whether they were the school toughs or the church kids, and make everybody look guilty, the graph works.  If you want to dilute the impact of what is happening, the graph works.  

Here is a distillation of what it says:

 

Year    President       House               Senate         National Debt           % Increase

 

1980   Carter             Dem       Dem           $0.93 trillion                        ---

1988   Reagan           Dem       Dem           $2.67 trillion                        187% 

1992    Bush G.H.W Dem       Dem           $4       trillion                       49.8%

2000  Clinton          Rep         Rep             $5.58 trillion                        39.9%

2008  Bush G. W.    Dem       Dem           $10.64 trillion          90.68%

2013   Obama           Rep         Dem           $17 trillion                55.97%

 

But here is what the graph doesn’t show:  The increase in our national debt from the Carter administration to now is 1728%!  In that same 33 years our GDP has increased only 134%.  We are spending money almost 13 times faster than we make it!  Does it really take a math genius to see that this is an impossible situation?  If your combined family income is $77,000 do you really think it would be smart to spend over $1 million dollars a year, and to do that year, after year, after year?

            You can expound all you want on who did what, whether it was justified and what good and bad came from it.  I want to ask you just one question.  We have increased our debt 1728 times in my daughters’ life time.  We are spending money 13 times faster than we can make it.  How long can this go on? 

            Here is the train track, here comes the train. 

            Try to justify this kind of spending and keep the faith.