As our national debt continues to grow and our economy continues to flounder, any hope of balanced budgets seems to be getting more elusive.
We are facing — or really, not “facing” but “experiencing” — our third consecutive year of more than a trillion dollars in annual budget red ink!
The Treasury Department announced recently that so far this fiscal year we have spent $1.1 trillion beyond our high tax collections — with a couple months of spending to go. For all of last year, we ran $1.29 trillion short, and our record deficit was $1.41 trillion, in 2009. Before that, we had never even been close to a single-year trillion-dollar deficit.
Now, our cumulative national debt is approximately $14.6 trillion, and rising.
As a reminder, that comes to a staggering total of almost $47,000 per citizen, or $130,000 per taxpayer.