National Debt Threatens our Future

Statement

The American people are growing more frustrated and worried about the size of our national debt. A recent Gallup Poll showed that the public believes that federal government debt is as much of a threat to our country's future well-being as terrorism. And, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apparently agrees. In a recent speech he is reported to have said, "Our national debt is our biggest national security threat."

The national debt has increased to more than $13 trillion. To put that into perspective, each man, woman and child in the United States owes somewhere around $40,000. And, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), we may not have seen the worst of this yet -- not by a long shot.

The CBO prefers to measure the nation's debt burden in relation to the economy as a whole, expressed as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product, basically the sum of the price of all goods or services produced or rendered in this country -- every car, every haircut, every hamburger.
At the moment the CBO says our publicly held debt has risen lately by about one-fourth the size of everything that we do or make. By the end of this year, which for the federal government ends on Sept. 30, the debt is projected to reach 62 percent of GDP.

If steps are not taken to reduce the nation's borrowing and pay back what we already owe, the national debt could reach nearly 200 percent of everything of value we do or make in this country by 2030.

In a figurative sense, we will be "under water," just like people who owe more on their houses than they're worth or have higher credit card bills than they can pay. And the deeper we get, the more nervous the investors who finance our debt will become. So they raise the interest rates they charge us.
This pushes the country even deeper into debt.

In economic terms, it's the perfect storm.

It would leave us hampered in a crisis -- at the mercy of our creditors if we faced a national emergency, such as a military threat, financial meltdown, or a natural disaster.

This is not where we want to be, and we need to get ourselves off of this bull's eye as quickly as we can.

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