Spending We Cannot Afford
This year's deficit is projected to be about $1.5 trillion dollars. In the past, I've talked about how big "just" $1 trillion is. Here are a couple ways to think about it: If you spent $1 million a day, every day since Jesus was born you'd still have about $250 billion left over. Stacked on top of one another, a trillion $1 bills would reach nearly 68,000 miles into the sky, which is about a third of the way from the Earth to the moon.
$1.5 trillion is a massive amount of money. In the case of our current budget crisis, it's a massive amount of debt we've now passed on to our children and grandchildren. And it's been added to the total U.S. debt which now stands at around $13.3 trillion.
What have we gotten for all of this new debt? Not much. We still have a national unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent and a virtually stagnant economy. That's because along with this explosion in government spending has come economic uncertainty, greater regulation of the private sector and the threat of higher levels of taxation.
Small businesses create seven out of every ten new jobs in this country. But they will not expand when they are threatened with an ever-changing and increasingly anti-business economic climate.
If the current Administration and Congressional leaders have proven one thing, it's that we cannot spend our way back to prosperity. Attempting it over and over again is the ultimate fool's errand, one we truly can no longer afford.
Sincerely,
