The National Debt: Getting in Touch with Reality

How bad is the national debt really?

David Walker, the non-partisan former Comptroller of the United States declared that if we were each handed our own personal share of the national debt, we’d each owe five to six times what we earn in income each year.

As bad as that sounds, it gets much worse. When unfunded entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are added to the equation, each and every citizen owes 25 to 30 times what he or she makes each year.

Let Walker’s numbers sink in for a moment.

A family making $50,000 per year owes between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000.

Only a nuclear Armageddon could harm the United States more ...

Blind Men and Elephants in the Room: How Much Should We Worry about the Public Debt?

President Obama is expected to announce today a $3.8 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit for FY2011. Here’s the context within which he will reveal his plan. For decades now, the federal debt acquired through years and years of deficit spending has been the “elephant in the room” – the huge presence nobody talks about but everyone knows is there. In last week’s State of the Union address, however, debt joined unemployment as the two most urgent issues facing America as Obama enters his second year as our President.

Last year, the White House and Congress went “Keynesian” in a big way as the real-estate bubble popped and ...