Washington needs to focus on national debt

Joe Zentis

Hermitage

A million here, a million there ... a lot of money? Today, for our government, it’s chump change. Today, the only useful number is trillion.

Unfortunately, a trillion isn’t just a little more than a million; it’s a million times a million. And the national debt is about 11.7 times that, growing at the rate of about $3,800 million per day.

Let’s put that in perspective. President Obama instructed his cabinet to come up with $100 million in budget cuts. That’s like me owing a loan shark $117,000 and telling him not to worry, because I found a way to save $1. ($1 is to $117,000 as $100 million is to $11.7 trillion).

Then he finds out I’m borrowing more money to pay for full coverage health insurance for myself, my family, and our friends; to make my home more energy efficient; and to buy hybrid cars for everyone in my family.

Somewhere along the line, the loan shark will think seriously about breaking my kneecaps.

You can’t blame President Obama for the national debt he inherited. However, you can blame him and Congress for adding to it. But they aren’t adding to it — they’re multiplying it. The White House recently admitted that they underestimated the ten-year projected size of the national debt by a mere $2 trillion.

Now, about that loan shark: picture foreclosure signs in front of the White House and the Capitol, with a bunch of Chinese and Japanese lined up to buy them (together, they own more than 40 percent of our national debt).

Now here’s the kicker: the national debt is our debt. Our personal share is roughly $38,000, and that grows by about $12 per day.

How much will our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchilden owe? It’s not unreasonable to picture them with broken kneecaps.

It doesn’t matter what is in the president’s or Congress’s health care plans, or in any of their other utopian projects. The bottom line is that we can’t afford them. The No. 1 priority of our government must become the reduction of the national debt.