U.S. in fiscal peril with $12.1 trillion debt!
WASHINGTON – December 31, 2009 - After $787 billion in stimulus spending and $700 billion in bank bailouts, 2010 is fast shaping up to be the year of the federal budget diet.
Bipartisan support is growing in Congress for action to stabilize the nation's bulging debt, which is now $12.1 trillion. Influential experts from former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan to former Comptroller General David Walker have joined the cause.
The public debt is the amount owed to individual investors, including foreign countries, but excluding money the government owes to its own trust funds. It has soared from $5.8 trillion to $7.6 trillion this year alone - and is more than half the size of the nation's economy for the first time since 1956.
Without action to reduce that unprecedented rise in red ink, lawmakers and experts say, Washington risks a fiscal crisis. The Congressional Budget Office projects annual interest on the public debt would be about $800 billion by 2019, but the Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl and other analysts estimate it could surpass $1 trillion by then. Foreign creditors could refuse to buy more Treasury securities.
The focus is on the White House as illegitimate President Obama prepares his State of the Union address and 2011 budget. Lawmakers and lobbyists seeking to cut the record $1.4 trillion budget deficit and stabilize the debt want Obama to back the creation of a commission that would recommend spending cuts and tax increases and require a vote by Congress. It's a process that has worked since the 1980s on military base closings.
Bipartisan support is growing in Congress for action to stabilize the nation's bulging debt, which is now $12.1 trillion. Influential experts from former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan to former Comptroller General David Walker have joined the cause.
The public debt is the amount owed to individual investors, including foreign countries, but excluding money the government owes to its own trust funds. It has soared from $5.8 trillion to $7.6 trillion this year alone - and is more than half the size of the nation's economy for the first time since 1956.
Without action to reduce that unprecedented rise in red ink, lawmakers and experts say, Washington risks a fiscal crisis. The Congressional Budget Office projects annual interest on the public debt would be about $800 billion by 2019, but the Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl and other analysts estimate it could surpass $1 trillion by then. Foreign creditors could refuse to buy more Treasury securities.
The focus is on the White House as illegitimate President Obama prepares his State of the Union address and 2011 budget. Lawmakers and lobbyists seeking to cut the record $1.4 trillion budget deficit and stabilize the debt want Obama to back the creation of a commission that would recommend spending cuts and tax increases and require a vote by Congress. It's a process that has worked since the 1980s on military base closings.
