BY RUSSELL TURNER
GROWING SNOWBALLS
When I was a child I loved to play in the snow. Whether it was having snow ball fights or sledding down a steep hill it was a fun time. I can remember getting up on the top of a steep hill and making a good tight snowball then throwing it down the hill and watching it grow larger as it went down the hill. Right at first the ball didn’t grow very fast, but as it got bigger it would pick up an ever increasing amount of snow; in fact if you tried to stop it the snowball would just run over you and continue to the bottom of the hill. The rolling snowball scenario reminds me of the increases of the United State’s national debt.
Many people today have grown to accept a huge national debt, but people of my generation know that spending beyond one’s means is not the natural thing to do. It may surprise some people that our national debt rose to over one trillion dollars on October 22, 1981. It might also surprise many to know that it took over 200 years to get to that point. During those 200 years we rose from a new nation to becoming a world power second to none. Our nation built the Panama Canal when other nations failed. Our fathers and grandfathers fought and won two world wars. We were the first to develop atomic power, and the only nation to put men on the moon and safely return them to earth. There are countless other accomplishments and we did all of them without leaving future generations with a mountain of debt. I might also note that for over half of the first 200 years our system was devoid of any income tax whatsoever!
After 1981 government spending seemed to go into overdrive. In a mere 27-year period from 1981 ($1 trillion in debt) to 2008 our debt increased 9 trillion dollars for a total of $10 trillion. Today, less than eight years after hitting $10 trillion, the US government reports that it hit the $19 trillion mark. When you look at it objectively, our forefathers accomplished great things without going into debt, now look at the job we have done over the past 34 years. Our government has spent money on social programs that have not benefited the people that they were supposed to help; most of them were used as an election year ploy to get elected. We have also played crony capitalism to bail out irresponsible banks and corporations that didn’t use good business principles. The first trillion dollars in debt (which took two centuries to accumulate) versus the most recent trillion (which took only 14 months). Even with all of this spending in the past 14 months, both the Disability Trust Fund and the Highway Trust Fund ran out of cash. And we still haven’t learned our lesson; the Congressional Budget Office recently reported that government debt will reach $30 trillion within a decade.
I have written several columns about the seriousness of the debt problem, maybe some people tire of me doing that, but this debt problem will roll over all of us just like a giant snowball if we don’t regain some fiscal responsibility.
Comments
Post a Comment