What will happen to you if you constantly spend 10 percent more each year than your income?
It’s no mystery: You’ll go broke and be in very deep trouble.
Well, the same is true of the federal government when — year after year — it spends many billions of dollars more than it has coming in from taxes.
The difference is that you can’t dodge the inevitable result very long, while the federal government irresponsibly can delay a showdown.
Our federal government has piled up a staggering national debt of $12.9 trillion, and rising. Our taxes are paying interest on it, while debt grows!
How much is the debt growing? Currently, the national debt is growing close to $1.5 trillion a year!
Don’t you think it is the responsibility of the president of the United States to present budgets that at least would slow the growth of the national debt, and point toward eventual responsible federal finance?
Don’t you believe it is the job of Congress to call on the president at least to begin finding solutions to financial irresponsibility?
Well, President Barack Obama has decided to dodge his responsibility. Instead of taking the budget deficit and debt problem into his own hands to insist on cutting many unconstitutional, unnecessary, unsound and inflated federal spending items, President Obama has simply appointed a “commission” to give him some deficit-reduction “suggestions.”
He has appointed the National Commission on Federal Responsibility and Reform. But it is expected to offer solutions that won’t be fully implemented until 2015 — after President Obama’s current term of office will be over, and the debt and deficit problems surely will be much worse.
Why doesn’t the president do his job now? It’s because it’s a tough problem that he doesn’t want to face.
So right now — in 2010 — the federal government is spending about 10.3 percent more than the total of our entire gross domestic product, or GDP.
We’ve been doing it too long, with bad consequences.
Didn’t the president ask for the job of leading our country responsibly — now?
The president isn’t doing his job.
Unfortunately, neither is Congress.
Nor do “we” want to face the problem and painfully solve it.
That means the deficit and debt and our tax problems will get worse.
Do we have the kind of leadership we need?