Here is a figure that ought to alarm anybody who is even slightly concerned about the breathtaking pace of borrowing and spending by our federal government: Ten years from now, in 2020, the United States will spend $2 trillion to pay just the interest on our catastrophic national debt.
To put that number in perspective, $2 trillion is more than half the total amount of money that the federal government will spend in the entire current budget year – on everything from Social Security to national defense. Yet that is how much money we will be paying in interest alone just one decade from now!
Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and now a member of a national debt commission, described it graphically: “This debt is like a cancer. It is truly going to destroy the country from within,” he recently told a meeting of the National Governors Association.
All that interest we have to pay – much of it to foreign nations – will be “going somewhere else, to create jobs and opportunity somewhere else,” he added.
Our national debt is already a massive $13.2 trillion, and that figure is expected to jump to more than $14 trillion by 2011 – and continue growing by the trillions over the next few years.
Shouldn’t it be obvious that the United States cannot continue spending as we have and somehow expect that it will “all turn out” for the good? Shouldn’t there be prompt, laser-like focus on shrinking, rather than expanding, the federal government?