Jay R. Thomas

Budget Deficit vs National Debt 

          Each year the President presents a budget to Congress, but it is the Congress which ultimately decides how much money is actually spent and what it is spent on.  The deficit is the difference between the money the government takes in (mainly taxes) and what the government spends (including interest payments on debt) each year.  When there is a deficit, Treasury must borrow the money needed for the government to pay its bills.  For each dollar the current Democrat controlled Congress spends, 41 cents has to be borrowed! 

          The national debt is the total sum of the accumulated annual deficits.  Our current national debt of more than 13 trillion dollars ($13,000,000,000.00) means that every U.S. citizen owes more than $43,000.00 as their portion of this debt.  And this doesn’t even take into account unfunded obligations like medicare and social security which could add another 45 to 50 trillion dollars to the national debt.  Since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 the national debt has continued to increase by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day!  It should be of great concern to every American that 50% of our national debt is owed to foreign lenders, like some of the OPEC nations and Communist China.

          During President Bush’s 6^th year (2006) the Republican controlled 109^th Congress was responsible for a deficit of $248,181,000.00 (248 billion dollars).  By 2008 the Democrat controlled 110^th Congress had nearly doubled that to $458,555.00.  By 2009 with Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House, the deficit skyrocketed to $1,400,000,000.00 (1.4 trillion dollars)!  Because the national debt is the total sum of the accumulated annual deficits, the national debt increased by more than one third during that same period.  There appears to be no end in sight to this profligate spending by the left wing liberals in Congress, with two additional bills totally billions more in nonexistent dollars having just been passed.  Social spending is now the largest expense item in our federal budget. 

          Americans of all ages are deeply concerned about the mounting debt and the large amount of interest that we pay on that debt each year.  Unless this trend is reversed by voting these liberal politicians out of Congress in November, the young people of our country will be stuck paying off trillions of dollars in debt with higher tax rates and a diminished quality of life.  Perhaps that is why we are seeing increasing numbers of high school and college students challenging their liberal teachers in class and joining the conservative movement. 

          A national debt of 13 trillion dollars and growing is indeed a serious problem.  Worse yet is the specter of a complete failure of our economy.  Countries fail when the economy fails, as was most recently seen with the collapse of the former Soviet Union.  Sorry to point out that what we have been discussing is just the national debt and does not even take into consideration the out of control spending and mounting debts of state and local governments, many of whom are already bankrupt!

          It is an interesting historical fact that before 1974 Congress had no formal process for establishing a coherent budget.  When Republican President Richard Nixon refused to spend some of the money the Democrat controlled 93^rd Congress had earmarked, Congress created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to challenge him and direct control of the budget away from the president and toward Congress.  Imagine a president having the leadership to stand up to a spendthrift Congress and refuse to waste taxpayer’s money!