It got far less attention than it deserved, but on Wednesday, our national debt passed the $15 trillion mark for the first time in history.
When President Barack Obama came into office in early 2009, the national debt was about $10.6 trillion. So it has increased by $4.4 trillion in only his first three years in office!
That compares with a slower -- but still serious -- $4.9 trillion increase in the national debt between the time former President George W. Bush took office in early 2001 and the time he left office eight years later.
There's no mystery about how we got into this fix: As a nation, we have imposed high taxes -- and yet we have spent far more than the revenue that those tax rates generate.
Some specifics:
- We have failed to reform our entitlement programs. As a result, Medicare could go broke in a few years, and Social Security will follow suit not too long after that.
- We have added new costs -- such as a massively expensive Medicare prescription drug benefit -- even when we had no idea how to pay for existing benefits.
- We added last year the huge, bureaucratic ObamaCare socialized medicine program, which is saddling not only the federal government but state governments and individuals with higher costs.
- We have continued our breakneck spending on wasteful, unconstitutional items such as subsidies for farmers and passenger rail service.
- We have bailed out with tax dollars a range of failing companies, as well as government-run mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
- Through unreasonable environmental rules, we have made it harder to produce cost-effective domestic energy, forcing our nation to rely instead on expensive oil imported from unstable, anti-American countries.
- At the same time, we have funneled money to impractical alternative energy production schemes, often with disastrous financial results.
Perhaps saddest of all, though, we have signaled as a people that we want government to do more and more for us and have not upheld the ideal of self-sufficiency that helped made America great.
There are now some efforts in Washington to trim deficits -- but they are paired with demands that taxes be increased.
Unfortunately, there is little reason to think Congress would use increased tax revenue to cut the debt rather than to spend more.
So, we have a shocking $15 trillion debt that is crippling our chances for economic recovery and threatening a further downgrade of the United States' credit rating.
Shouldn't the size of our debt -- and the negative consequences it has brought -- prompt us to demand real spending cuts from Congress? How long do we think we can continue with this fiscal recklessness before we face catastrophe?