With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.
The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.
Right-wingers have been trying to lay the blame for the debt on Obama, but the bulk of the debt was the result of Reagan’s and Bush’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Reagan tripled the federal debt and Bush doubled it.
The only way out of this mess is to raise taxes on the wealthy. There’s nothing wrong with working hard and becoming a millionaire, but many of the uber-wealthy haven’t acquired their wealth by creating anything of value; they’ve done it by gaming our system. People like Stephen J. Hemsley are paid over five million a year from health insurance premiums — or more specifically, by raising health insurance premiums and denying coverage.
And then we have the massive bonuses and salaries paid to Goldman Sachs executives — the very people who helped bring our country to the brink of another great depression. Again, these people made their fortunes by gaming our system, and when the system went belly-up, they got bailed out using borrowed money that is paid for with our tax dollars.
The biggest threat to our country is not terrorism; it’s the debt. Right-wingers defend the very people who have bankrupted our country and now are trying to blame Obama. That makes them complicit because they’re blocking any action or reform to fix the problem. It’s all political. They love their party more than they love their country, and their “love” of their country takes the form of extreme nationalism. Fascist dictators throughout history have used extreme nationalism to gain power. We were heading in that direction under the Bush administration with the rubber stamp Republican Congress and came dangerously close. The 2006 elections saved us this time. Next time we might not be so lucky.
