It was on the last day of July, and sadly with the with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives acting as his willing accomplice, that Barry "Almighty" committed what can only be described as act of gross, and yet very purposeful, fiscal mismanagement. And his action also equated to what was a crime against the future of our children. You see, it was on that day, that the federal debt hit $17,687,136,723,410.59. That is an increase of roughly $7 Trillion just since Barry first took office on Jan. 20, 2009.
That $17,687,136,723,410.59 in debt works out to be approximately $171,575 for each of our 103,087,000 remaining ‘full-time’ year-round workers that the Census Bureau says were still here in the United States as of 2012. And that counts the 16,606,000 full-time year-round workers who took their paychecks from the government, rather than working for themselves or for some private organization. So each of us who, by the grace of God, are still lucky enough to have a full-time job, are forced to walk around with this additional weight on our shoulders.
The $7,060,259,674,497.51 that Barry helped add to the federal debt between his first inauguration and the last day of July works out to be about $68,488 for each full-time year-round worker in the country as of 2012. And you have to ask yourself just how many of those full-time workers might have gone out and borrowed an additional $68,488 in their own names since Barry first took office. Somehow I doubt very many, unless it was to, perhaps, take out a mortgage on a house they are now already paying down.
Barry has never bothered to offer up any sort of a plan of how he would go about paying down the federal debt, or bring the federal budget into balance. And that would only be because he has little or no interest in doing either. His only plan, you see, is to find out just how much further he can put this country into debt. Now it was shortly before the new debt under Barry streaked past the $7 Trillion mark, that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its latest long-term budget outlook. And it painted a rather grim picture of things to come.
You see it is now according to the CBO that if current laws are not changed in just 25 years from now the federal government will be spending 6.3 percent of the gross domestic product on Social Security alone. That same year, it will spend 4.6 percent of GDP on Medicare, 3.4 percent on Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and Obamacare subsidies, and 4.7 percent on net interest on the federal debt. Together, federal spending on just Social Security, the major health programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Chips and Obamacare), and interest on the debt will equal 19 percent of GDP.
And all that will be before the federal government will spend its first penny on such things as food stamps, public housing, the Department of Education or the Environmental Protection Agency, all of which will most assuredly be far more costly that today. It is also before the federal government spends a penny on national defense or the State Department, which carry out its core constitutional responsibilities. And it is before the federal government spends a penny to staff and maintain the judiciary and legislative branches.
When you add the 6.4 percent of GDP in deficit spending that the CBO estimates the federal government will undertake in 2039 to the 19 percent the federal government will spend solely on Social Security, federal health programs and interest on existing debt, that equals 25.4 percent of GDP. Similarly, when you add up all federal spending that the CBO estimates will take place in 2039 it equals 25.9 percent of GDP. Am I the only one who finds that as being not only an act of complete fiscal recklessness, but also of pure insanity?
The White House Office of Management and Budget maintains an historical table that lists federal tax revenues and spending as percentages of GDP for each year from 1930 through 2013. It shows that in that 84-year span there was only one year when revenue went as high as 20 percent of GDP. That was 1944, at the height of World War II. In 1943, 1944 and 1945, during the war, federal spending ran at 42.6 percent, 42.7 percent and 41.0 percent of GDP. Since then, it has never exceeded 25 percent, and has averaged 19.3 percent.
In order for the federal government to be able to balance the budget at 25 percent of GDP, will require future generations, or whatever percentage still required to do so, to pay taxes at levels never before experienced in this country. And also, for the federal government to maintain the current welfare state without balancing the budget would require accumulating levels of debt unprecedented in American history. According to the CBO, "With deficits as big as the ones that CBO projects, federal debt would be growing faster than GDP, a path that would ultimately be unsustainable."
The CBO said, "How long the nation could sustain such growth in federal debt is impossible to predict with any confidence." It went on to say, "At some point, investors would begin to doubt the government's willingness or ability to pay its debt obligations, which would require the government to pay much higher interests costs to borrow money." It added, "If a fiscal crisis were to occur in the United States, policymakers would have only limited — and unattractive, options for responding." So why must we push things to the absolute spending limit?
And as the CBO explains it, "In particular government would need to undertake some combination of three approaches: restructure the debt (that is, seek to modify the contractual terms of existing obligations), pursue an inflationary monetary policy, and adopt an austerity program of spending cuts and tax increases. The bottom line here is that, sooner or later, we will need to reel in our ballooning welfare state. And it would much better if we were to begin that process now and not after the fiscal implosion, that we all know is coming, finally arrives.
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