National Debt Up $3 Trillion on Obama's Watch

National Debt Up $3 Trillion on Obama's Watch

Mark Knoller
CBS New
Oct. 19, 2010

New numbers posted today on the Treasury Department website show the National Debt has increased by more than $3 trillion since President Obama took office.

The National Debt stood at $10.626 trillion the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated. The Bureau of Public Debt reported today that the National Debt had hit an all time high of $13.665 trillion.

The Debt increased $4.9 trillion during President Bush's two terms. The Administration has projected the National Debt will soar in Mr. Obama's fourth year in office to nearly $16.5-trillion in 2012. That's more than 100 percent of the value of the nation's economy and $5.9-trillion above what it was his first day on the job.

Mr. Obama frequently lays blame for soaring federal deficits on his predecessor.

"By the time I got into office we already had a $1.3 trillion deficit and we had exploded the national debt," he said last month during one of his backyard chats with Americans.

Just last Friday, the Treasury Department portrayed it as good news when it reported that the federal deficit in the fiscal year that ended September 30th was $1.294 trillion. That's less than the $1.416 trillion deficit accrued in 2009 - the largest federal deficit ever recorded. It was also less than the $1.556 trillion that had been initially projected for 2010.

The soaring deficit and Debt is one of the reasons Mr. Obama is adamantly opposed to extending tax cuts for Americans earning over $250,000 a year.

The ten year cost would total $700-billion and Mr. Obama says it would needlessly add to the deficit and Debt.

"And then we've got to pay interest to China or whoever else is willing to buy our debt," he repeatedly argued in recent weeks.

President Obama and Congress await recommendations on ways to reduce federal deficits from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

The 18-member panel will report December 1st - after the midterm election.

The Commission, chaired by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, was established by Mr. Obama to provide recommendations on how to "put the budget into primary balance, meaning that the federal government will pay for all of its programmatic obligations."

The federal budget was last in balance from 1998 to 2001.

Hope And Change... By Numbers

Neal Boortz
October 19, 2010

It took from 1776 until 1990 for the federal government to accumulate a total of $3 trillion in debt. It took 22 months for Barack Obama to add another $3 trillion to the federal debt. Now there's a real over-achiever for you! And of course we absolutely positively needed to spend every single cent. Not one penny was wasted!

This level of spending is unacceptable for any elected official past, present and future. It needs to be said that Obama didn't do this all by himself. George Bush didn't double the size of the federal government all by himself either. It doesn't matter what your political party, if you're part of the problem party affiliation means nothing. The main blame here gets assigned to our Congress. More specifically, the House of Representatives ... under Democrat ownership since 2007. ALL spending bills must originate here. It's one part of our Constitution we still seem to pay attention to. So as long as we're paying attention, let's look again at these figures from the Wall Street Journal,

• When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, the debt held by the public was 36.2% of GDP. It rose to 40.2% the next year. This year it will be about 63.6%, next year 68.6%, then 77% of GDP in 2020. And the Obama administration's budget estimates 218% in 2050.
  
  
• The deficit in 2007 was $160 billion. In the next year the Pelosi-Reid Congress took it up to $458 billion, and when President Obama came into office in 2009 it hit $1.4 trillion. The current 2010 projected deficit is $1.6 trillion, which will lead to a tripling of our national debt from 2008 to 2020.
  

Congress holds the purse strings but you hold the reins. You have exactly two weeks from today. That's the easy part. Your children and your grandchildren ... whether yet arrived on this planet or not ... are watching and depending on you. Right now around 40 cents out of every dollar that our amazing spendthrift government spends is borrowed money ... borrowed principally from China, Japan and Great Britain. Your children and grandchildren will have to pay this money back. That baby bump your wife (or you) is hauling around? That's a debtor. A deep-in-debt debtor.

You have two weeks.