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In the time it takes you to read this column, the United States will have gone another $15 million in debt.
That's right. Every single minute, Congress spends $3,324,399 more than it takes in.
Yes, every minute of every day, all year long.
That means that, today, we will go $194 million more in debt, and we will do the same thing tomorrow.
They have been doing that for years, and have now run up a national debt of $33.9 trillion.
And, folks, they have no plans to stop doing that!
Why that isn't the number-one political issue of our time boggles my feeble, old mind.
Do you have any idea how big a trillion dollars is? Well, if each dollar represented just one second, a million seconds ago was 12 days ago. A billion seconds ago was 32 years ago, and a trillion seconds was 32,000 years ago. But we don't owe just 1 trillion, we owe 34 trillion, so 34 trillion seconds ago was over a million years ago.
That means that, if we started paying off our debt at one dollar per second, with no interest payments, we could pay if off in a million years. Safe to say, I won't be around to see that happen. Heck, the human race may not be here in a million years.
So where does that congressional insanity stop?
As I said, they have no plan.
Just last year, we raised $4.4 trillion in taxes and fees to run our country. That's good. We spent $6.1 trillion dollars, and that's bad.
If you had a company, like we have a country, and you hired people to manage your company's finances, just like we hire representatives to handle our country's finances, and your managers spent 40% more than they took in and they did so for decades, you would have fired them. Well, it's no different owning our country, except in 2022 we reelected 95% of incumbent representatives and 100% of incumbent senators.
Are we crazy, or is it we just don't care if our country goes broke?
Are we the richest country, as we claim to be, or are we the poorest country because we owe so much?
Right now, our national debt is more debt than China, Japan, France, and Italy combined.
Are we worried about it? We don't seem to be.
And the interest rates are going up, as we know. Just look at what interest rates are doing to the price of cars and homes. The same thing is happening to our nation's interest payments. Forecasts show that, over the next 10 years, our interest payments alone will top $10 trillion. In other words, interest payments will be the largest line item in our budget, even larger than our defense budget.
To get that under control, two things must happen, but they won't.
The two things are to drastically increase taxes or drastically cut spending.
As anyone who follows national politics knows, Congress won't do either.
Why not, you ask? Because it is more important to them that they get reelected than it is to get our financial house in order. They know raising taxes or cutting spending means they would have a lot of explaining to do back home, and it wouldn't go well, and they would be fired.
In other words, the way I see it, they like their job more than they do the country.
So what can we do about it?
To start with, as they run for office next year, we must ask -- no, we must demand -- they give us their plan in full detail how we can balance our budget and begin paying off the debt that right now is destined to be passed down to our grandchildren. Our elected representatives owe us that much, and, if they don't have a solid plan they can communicate to us, they don't deserve the right to represent us.
We need people who will make the difficult decisions to once and for all give us a government we can afford and people who will quit stealing my children's and my grandchildren's money.
Personally, I am ashamed of my generation, which may be the first in American history to leave our country worse off than the one that was left to us.
That makes us old people upset, and should make every single American upset, as well. And, if I ran for office, the last thing I would want to do is upset a bunch of old people. That would be bad for their political future. And, if they come knocking on my door for donations, the first thing I will tell them is, "Stay off my lawn!"
Folks, I ask you to weigh in, or is it just me who is worried about our country's financial health? Let me know at gregawtry@awtry.com.
Greg Awtry is the former publisher of the Scottsbluff (Neb.) Star-Herald and Nebraska's York News-Times. He is now retired and living in Hubbard Lake. Greg can be contacted at gregawtry@awtry.com.