It defies reason to claim that our federal government, which is taking in over $2 trillion in taxes each year, is taxing the American people "too little."
And yet at the same time, we are going deeper in the red, more than $1.4 trillion each fiscal year, because Congress insists on spending far more than even our nation's burdensome tax rates can bring in. With that pattern having persisted year after year under multiple congresses and administrations, it is no surprise that we have a $14.3 trillion debt - and hundreds of billions of dollars in annual interest payments on that debt.
So, could the United States actually go broke? Some European nations that have been spending the way we do in this country are, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. And with Medicare, Social Security and other obligations rapidly rising in cost, is it so farfetched to think we will, in the not-too-distant future, hit a point at which we can't pay our bills?
Do you believe foreign countries would lend us what we need - on top of the huge amounts of money we already owe to nations such as Communist China?
We hope we never have to find out the hard answers to such questions.
But we are up against the $14.3 trillion legal debt limit - with no clear plan in place to cut spending. Instead, many lawmakers and the president are actually pushing for an increase in the debt limit.
Left unexplained is how doing more of the borrowing and spending that got us to this point will solve the debt problem.