Who is Afraid of the National Debt?

The big stink today is that the projected budget deficits for fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010 were revised upward by the White House. To put this figure in perspective, the budget for fiscal 2009 is $3,100,000,000,000 with a projected deficit of $1,840,000,000,000 revised upward from $1,750,000,000,000. The 2010 proposed budget is $3,600,000,000,000 with a projected deficit of $1,250,000,000,000 revised upward from $1,190,000,000,000. We are looking at adding over $3,000,000,000,000 to the national debt over the next 2 years all in the name of saving the country from economic collapse.

Of course these numbers are way too incomprehensible for most Americans for many of them have lost track of how many zeros are in a billion or a trillion dollars. We barely speak in millions anymore and the value of a billion dollars, of being 1000 million, does not seem to rankle many minds. In the last decade the shift from speaking in millions to speaking in billions happened almost without alarm as if the move from millions of dollars to billions of dollars was a small incremental, a mere matter of changing from an "m" to a "b".

Now, in the short span of a couple of years, we have graduated to speaking in trillions, too overwhelmed to comprehend the new valuations, afraid but mired in our own mathematical and financial ignorance. Imagine an individual or a family making $50,000 a year and spending $125,000 - overspending by $75,000 in just one year. That is how our government is spending right now and that is how it has been spending over the last decade and that is how it will continue to spend over the next. Every year, we are promised a reduction in government spending and every year it overspends. Until it can get to the point of spending less than what it brings in, the national debt will just continue to skyrocket. Bill Clinton famously balanced the budget at the end of the 90s and delivered a surplus to the incoming President Bush nevertheless, he still increased the national debt.

Of course, the only way to solve this problem is to cut spending or raise taxes. But, no one wants to see their taxes raised and no one can agree on what to cut from the budget. At the end of the day, every group has a vested interest in keeping the status quo; government employees do not want to see their jobs cut, the citizenry does not want to see any of its programs or services cut and most of all, elected officials won't dare offend either group in order to get re-elected.

While we are patently afraid of saddling the next generation with potentially insurmountable debt, we are unwilling to take any real action to prevent it. Instead we resort to the same pipe dream solution that has been in place for decades; that with the right economic and fiscal policy, we can grow ourselves out of our financial mess. We fail to accept the reality that the only thing that has grown is our collective debt; that of government and individual alike.