Pages

9 August 2024

Ron Paul: America Reaches A Sad Milestone – OpEd

Ron Paul

Last week the national debt reached 35 trillion dollars, a mere seven months after the debt reached 34 trillion dollars. To put this in perspective, the national debt first reached one trillion dollars in October of 1981, almost 200 years after the Constitution’s ratification!

The fact that the government was adding one trillion dollars in debt in little over half a year was not deemed worthy of comment by President Biden, Vice President Harris, and most other US politicians. This is not surprising since the national debt has not been a central issue in DC since the days of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party’s efforts to focus attention on the debt resulted in a bipartisan deal that made minuscule spending cuts. In fact, most of the cuts were not real cuts. They were just reductions in the “projected rate of spending increase,” meaning the spending still increased but just by not as much as originally planned.

This was not the first time that apparent spending limits consisted of smoke and mirrors. For example, the budget “surpluses” of the 1990s were due to the government’s practice of counting the social security trust fund as both a liability and an asset, not because of bipartisan budget deals.

No comments:

Post a Comment