By Walter Simpson
Buffalo, NY – Concerned? Outraged? Those words appear on the national debt clock I just got from the Concord Coalition. The clock is the size of a credit card. It came in the mail with simple instructions. Go to the U.S. Treasury website, punch in the national debt, and then start the clock and watch the debt grow.
I have been watching this thing tick off debt for two weeks now and it's unnerving. Deficit spending is expected to hit a record 420 billion dollars this year, so my clock adds 1.15 billion dollars debt every day. Or 13,300 dollars a second -- each second, every second. Like the Duracell bunny it just keeps on going. Adding to the monstrous debt our children will eventually have to pay back.
Oh, I forgot to tell you the total amount of the national debt. It's now 8.4 trillion dollars. If for a second we forget about the 0.4, we're looking at an eight followed by twelve zeros. And Congress just upped the debt ceiling to nine trillion. Lay 8 trillion dollar bills end to end and they would stretch over 750 million miles.
Or more than 3,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
Or 30,000 times around the Earth at the equator.
Or 250,000 times the distance from New York City to San Francisco.
The national debt is now more than $100,000 per American family of four.
Or, in the words of one recent news story, more than the weight of eight Eifel Towers made of solid gold.
The Republicans used to accuse the Democrats of over-spending. But the size of government and overall spending has soared under President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress. Their spending spree has been accompanied by tax cuts, mostly for the rich, producing record deficits year after year.
For a while Ronald Reagan held the record deficit spending crown. Eight years of his voodoo economics increased the national debt by $1.6 trillion. Bush Senior continued to pile on the debt but only had four years to do damage. With the help of a booming economy, Clinton turned ballooning deficits into surpluses but they disappeared the first year of George W. Bush's presidency. W and his team of neo-conservative budget bashers are on track to adding over $3 trillion dollars to the national debt by the end of Bush II's second term.
But aren't these extraordinary times when large deficits are justified? That's what I heard from my Congressman Republican Tom Reynolds when I complained about the latest deficit. Oh Tom, give me a break. You guys brought this on through your shameless pork-barreling and inept policies that both invited and failed to stop the 9/11 attacks, leading to an apparently endless war on terrorism and senseless war in Iraq - both misadventures being hugely costly and entirely avoidable.
Not counting the tens of thousands of lives which have been lost on all sides, the current direct costs of the war in Iraq are $270 billion. The costs to budget blighted Erie County have been just over a billion dollars. Just imagine what else we might have done with that kind of money right here at home.
But those numbers significantly under-estimate the cost of the war.
We need to add in the future costs of the war because, as we all know, it ain't over yet. We also need to add in the cost of lifetime care and disability benefits for the 16,000 Americans who have been seriously wounded, the cost of replacing all the military equipment which has been chewed up by the war, and the higher costs to find and keep soldiers who are fleeing not flocking to military service. Then there are the costs to the economy of higher oil prices. A Nobel laureate economist recently concluded that all these costs bring the war's likely total to a trillion or more dollars. Of course, the war's costs would be even higher if they included the costs to rebuild Iraq, a country we have laid to waste.
Taking a step back from all this craziness you have to wonder whether the real Republican agenda is to drive the federal government into bankruptcy in order to eliminate all its social, environmental, and regulatory functions. These guys know public service when they see it.
In other news, President Bush just announced that he's nominating Idaho's Governor Dirk Kempthorne to be the next Secretary of the Interior. While in the U.S. Senate, Kempthorne received consecutive zero scores for his environmental voting record by the League of Conservation Voters, scores that clearly qualify him for this key environmental position in the Bush Administration.
"Reality Check" with Commentator Walter Simpson is a monthly feature of WBFO News.
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