Do you think federal taxes are too low?
Do you think federal spending is too high?
These are questions too many of our federal officials — and we — don’t want to face.
On the city, county and state levels, we can’t very easily dodge such questions. But on the federal government level, where such problems are worst, the harsh financial facts are too much ignored.
Our national debt is a staggering $13 trillion! Yes, that’s trillion! It’s $13,000,000,000,000!
Who can really understand that? So we tend to “turn it off” — except, of course, we can’t escape paying taxes to cover the interest on that huge debt.
We can understand the national debt a little better if we face the fact that it is $42,367 per citizen. (Our population is nearly 309 million people.)
Of course, not every citizen pays federal taxes, some being too young, some too old, some not earning. So how much is our national debt per taxpayer? It’s $118,756!
But Congress keeps voting to spend more — much more than even too-high taxes bring in. So our national debt is rising $4.01 billion every day!
Where is this taking us? It’s leading us into deeper trouble.
We read about the national economic distress of countries like Greece, for instance, but do we realize we are following them?
Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf said this week, “If policy-makers are to put the nation on a sustainable budgetary path, they will need to let revenues increase substantially as a percentage of gross domestic product, decrease spending significantly from projected levels, or adopt some combination of those two approaches.”
“Translated,” that means “higher taxes” or “less spending” — or “some of each.”
By the end of this year, our too-big federal spending, despite too-big federal taxing, will mean our national debt will be 62 percent of our gross domestic product — everything we produce this year!
The president and most members of Congress — and we — do not want to face these facts. So the financial bad news continues to grow.
We can’t permanently dodge the bad results.