Supercommittee member, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., fends off reporters as he arrives to meet in the Capitol Hill office of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., with other Supercommittee members as time for action by the deficit reduction panel grows short, Monday Nov. 21, 2011, of Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)Shouldn’t all of us agree — readily — that it is desirable not to increase our national debt?
If the now-$15 trillion debt were divided equally among all Americans, it would be a burden of $48,000 per person!
And in an alarming new sign of how big the problem is, our debt has just surpassed our gross domestic product — the total economic output of our country for an entire year.
Isn’t that a sad testament to our financial recklessness?
Our country fortunately is not in a war on the scale of, say, World War II. And despite serious economic problems, we are not in a true depression, either. So we are in a position to reduce the cataclysmic spending that has gotten us into this sorry fiscal state of affairs — if only we will.