National Debt Predicted to Almost Double in 10 Years

The Obama administration has revised its estimate of how much debt the United States will pile on in the next 10 years. Hitherto the White House had estimated that the debt would increase by just over $7 trillion over 10 years. Now the figure is $9 trillion.

Putting it another way, from the beginning of the United States to 2009 the federal government has managed to amass just over eleven and a half trillion dollars. In just ten short years, thanks to Obama administration spending, that figure is estimated to almost double to just over twenty trillion dollars.

The deficit, being the difference between what the government takes in taxes and fees and what the government spends, is estimated to be an average of about nine hundred billion dollars over the life of the Obama administration, should it last eight years. A great part of that reason lays with the stimulus package, passed earlier this year, that spends eight hundred billion dollars in an attempt to jump start the anemic economy laid low by the liquidity crisis of last year. So far the stimulus does not seem to have worked.

Politicians have had a tendency to use the deficit and the national debt as a political weapon more than as a problem to be solved. When a Democrat is in the White House, he is accused of profligate spending, thus raising the annual budget deficit and the national debt. When a Republican is in the White House, he is accused of not taxing people enough, especially the so-called rich, thus raising the annual budget deficit and the national debt.

The only time in the modern age when there was not a budget deficit was during the later years of the Clinton administration. Gridlock between the Clinton White House and the Gingrich revolutionaries who had taken the Congress ensured that there would be no great spending programs. In addition the capital gains tax was cut, providing an economic stimulus. Finally the Dot.Com Internet boom was occurring, boosting tax revenues.

President George W. Bush was accused, with some degree of truth, of allowing the Republican Congress to spend money like drunken sailors. By the first decade of the 21^st Century, Republicans who had seized the Congress as reforming revolutionaries had become domesticated and used to spending money in order to curry favor with special interests.

The takeover of the Congress by Democrats in 2006 did not help matters. Indeed, it can be said that it made things worse. While the budget deficit had been steadily decreasing throughout the latter part of President Bush's term, it exploded again during the last year of the Bush administration largely because of the liquidity crisis and the government's attempts to bail out banks and other industries.

Things have gone from bad to worse with the advent of President Obama, ushering in the first trillion plus dollar deficits in history. The prospect of a twenty trillion dollar plus national debt takes the country into hitherto unknown fiscal territory. Will the debt ever be paid off? Can that size of debt even be managed? There are some who suggest not, with dire consequences to the world economy.

Source: Obama's Spending Plans Will Nearly Double the National Debt--White House Leaked the News Late on Friday, Terence P. Jeffrey, Cyber News Service, August 24th, 2009