Congress Must Take Steps to Control Spending

The House of Representatives voted today to raise the national debt limit by $1.9 trillion to $14.3 trillion. 30 Democrat members of Congress sided with Republicans in opposing the measure, which passed by a narrow 5-vote margin.

How much is $1.9 trillion? According to the Associated Press, if the federal government were to spend $1 every second, it would take about 60,000 years to spend $1.9 trillion. But $1.9 trillion won’t buy this Democrat controlled Congress even a year. Experts predict Democrats in Congress will need to increase the debt limit again in November, shortly after the election.
How much money does the debt limit increase represent? As the AP notes:

“It equals about $6,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S... It would be enough to provide Pell grants of $5,000 to some 380 million low-income students, a number exceeding the entire population of the country.”

The vote to increase the debt limit comes on the heels of the President unveiling a new federal budget that would spend $3.8 trillion in the coming fiscal year and increase the size of the federal bureaucracy to record levels.

The huge increases in federal spending are so high that even the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board is speaking out against them. In an editorial yesterday, the Inquirer is less than pleased with President Obama’s spending proposals:

“His proposed $3.8 trillion in spending puts the nation on course for deficits totaling more than $5 trillion over the next five years.

That's staggering. Recession or not, the country can't afford that level of spending. The federal government now borrows one-third of all the money it spends.

No household could survive very long like that. On this pace, interest payments on the national debt alone will reach $840 billion in 2020. That sum is more than the government is projected to spend in the same year on all discretionary domestic programs not related to security.”

We are on an extremely dangerous path. Within 10 years we will pay more each year in interest on our debt than we do on every discretionary federal government program outside of defense spending.

The current budget proposals are far too high. We need to start getting government spending under control now. This is not an issue that can be put off now. Our elected officials in Washington must begin to take responsibility, they need to begin to make tough decisions, and they need to do their job and eliminate wasteful spending and ineffective programs.

We cannot continue to amass huge amounts of debt to pass on to our children and grandchildren.