Democrats (and many Republicans) don’t seem to care about the mountain of debt Congress added last year and continues to add this year. Instead of simply opening the economy back up as the virus wanes, Democrats are plowing ahead with another $2 trillion in deficit spending.
The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan agency, warns that this mountain of debt will explode interest payments, such that over the next 30 years, taxpayers will have to pony up $61 trillion in interest. (Interest payments, by the way, don’t buy you government services. Interest payments just eat up cash and crowd out other government expenditures.)
By 2050, interest payments will consume nearly half of the entire budget!
The latest CBO report doesn’t pull any punches, the rapid expansion of the debt will “increase the risk of fiscal crisis – that is, a situation in which investors lose confidence in the U.S. government’s ability to service and repay its debt, causing interest rates to increase abruptly, inflation to spiral upward…”
CBO further warns that this mountain of debt could cause the world to replace the dollar as the reserve currency.
By 2050, the CBO estimates that our national debt will equal 202% of our gross national product. For years, fiscal conservatives, like myself have warned of the danger of having the national debt exceed 100% of the GDP but the CBO points out we are hurtling toward a time when our debt will be twice the size of the economy.
I, for one, have advocated that there is another answer to our current problems. Instead of printing more money and making believe that this money will retain its value as it is sprinkled across the land, we could remove the government shackles that have caused a depression in the restaurant, retail, and entertainment sectors of our economy.
Instead of passing out ‘free’ money, we should simply end the lockdowns. The daily incidence of COVID is in free fall. In addition, there is no evidence that the government lockdowns have worked.
I don’t know if I’ll make it to 2050 but my kids will and I hope soon that enough voters will decide that there is no such thing as a free lunch and debt today becomes massive interest payments tomorrow.
The economist John Maynard Keynes famously said that stimulus works in the short run and he didn’t much care about the future because we’d all be dead.
I will vote against any more ‘free’ money because I care about my kid’s future and the future of our great country.
You can read the Op-Ed HERE.