With America on a Spending Binge, the Debt Clock Is Ticking

America’s national debt passed a new milestone Tuesday, hitting $31 trillion — a figure one-quarter larger than America’s annual GDP of around $25 trillion. With deficit hawks an endangered species on Capitol Hill, who will protect our nest eggs from the reckoning that looms should we continue down our current path?When the National Debt Clock first appeared in Times Square in 1989, it warned about less than $3 trillion of red ink. In the years since, even as the numbers rolled over at a faster and faster clip, the Debt Clock has been moved to one and then another less conspicuous location. Out of sight, out of mind.The debt ceiling is a relic of an earlier era, when we weren’t so quick to mortgage our tomorrows for today, but it’s been reduced to a prop in our political theater. A few backbenchers make noise about respecting it, but Democrats and Republicans always join hands to up the limit.With the gold standard also a distant memory, there’s nothing to rein in the binge-spending, and Washington pays no price for keeping the money printing presses whirring. We do, of course, because it requires more of those devalued greenbacks to settle up with the bartender at the end of the night.Excessive spending has already brought on inflation, which the Fed has tried to counter by hiking rates, meaning the price paid to borrow money increases, too — and, as with a Visa card’s interest rate payments, that cash isn’t going to buy anything you want or to pay down the principal.There are fixes available. First is President Kennedy’s classic idea to grow the economy by cutting taxes, summarized as “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Yet instead of expanding the economy, we have just suffered two quarters of negative growth. Despite President Biden’s false boasts about having reduced the debt, we’re facing stagnation.Second is to reduce spending. On this front, there is at least some hope. The Republican in line to take over as House Budget Committee chairman, Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania, told Fox News that his party will confront the problem should they win a majority in November.“There’s a long history of excessive spending during both Democrat and GOP administrations,” he said. “[M]embers of leadership are talking about the debt as a huge threat to our nation, so I think there’s a readiness to act.” Success would require spinal transplants for the Republicans, but it’s the right idea.The Club for Growth’s president, David McIntosh, lays out the stakes if we don’t get those drunken sailors some black coffee and fast. “The exploding national debt is a major threat to all Americans,” he writes in an email. “It drives inflation, eating away at savings and raising the cost of everything. It drives interest rates, making mortgages unaffordable and crushing job-creation.“It is a symptom and driver of out-of-control federal spending, with annual interest costs now exceeding $400 billion a year. That’s over $3,000 per family. President Biden and the Democrats’ only economic plan is more spending. In November, voters are going to send a strong signal that new leadership and change are needed in Washington. They are right.”As Margaret Thatcher once said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”Americans need only look at Venezuela to see the future if we don’t cut the party short. As Time has reported, Venezuela was “once the richest country in Latin America.” That prosperity continued as late as 2001, the World Economic Forum notes. Then came a socialist as president, Hugo Chavez. He promised to spend the nation into utopia; instead, he delivered refugees, starvation, 80,000 percent inflation, and suffering unseen in recent memory outside of wartime.Bar tabs always come due, and America can’t dine-and-dash on ours. Paying bills may not be fun, but it’s a lot better than a crushing economic hangover. It’s time Washington sobered up and left the drunken spending to those who can hold their liquor.

With America on a Spending Binge, the Debt Clock Is Ticking

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