On Federal Spending & Debt

On Federal Spending & Debt - By Family Research Council

Fiscal Irresponsibility: 28 Facts on Spending and Debt

“We cannot mortgage our children's future on a mountain of debt. It's time to put an end to the runaway spending and the record deficits - it's not how you would run your family budget, and it must not be how Washington handles your tax dollars.”
- Sen. Barack Obama, October 1, 2008

“Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. American has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.”
- Sen. Barack Obama, explaining his vote against raising the national debt limit, March 20, 2006 -

1) On March 18 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saw the President’s submitted Fiscal Year 2012 budget as causing $9.5 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years. That is more debt than the federal government accumulated from 1789 to 2010 combined.
2) Under the President’s budget CBO estimates that the national debt held by the public—40 percent of GDP before the recession—would soar past 87 percent of GDP in a decade.
3) Senate Democrats opposed H.R. 1, the bill that was passed 235-189 by the House of Representatives, sought to only cut $61 billion from the current budget. All 56 Democrats in the Senate opposed the legislation despite $61 billion would only be 1.6 percent of the $3.8 trillion in federal spending this year.
4) As of March 16, 2011, the official debt of the United States government is $14.2 trillion ($14,232,849,993,955) which amounts to a $45,500 “birth tax” for every child born in America this year or $121,091 for every household.
5) Under President Obama: The debt started at $9.986 trillion and escalated to $14.2 trillion, a 38 percent increase over two years.
6) In 2006, Senator Harry Reid and then-Senator Barack Obama both voted against increasing the debt limit.
7) The last time the public debt decreased was in the mid-1950s.
8) The federal government is borrowing more than 42 cents on every dollar it spends.
9) All spending after July 27 of this year is borrowed spending.
10) The U.S. government's debt ceiling has been raised seven times since the beginning of 2006.
11) If you spent one dollar every second, you would have spent $1 million in twelve days. At that same rate, it would take you 32 years to spend $1 billion dollars. But it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend $1 TRILLION dollars.
12) A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times. That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt.
13) There are one million millions in a trillion
14) At his current annual salary of $42 million, basketball superstar LeBron James would need to work 23,809 years to earn $1 trillion.
15) One trillion is more stars than there are in the entire Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy contains approximately 400 billion stars, but some estimates vary by as much as 200 billion stars.
16) One million seconds will pass in the next 12 days. One billion seconds will take 32 years. One trillion seconds will pass in 31,688 years.
17) A trillion seconds ago, civilization didn’t exist. A billion minutes ago, Trajan was emperor in Rome. A million hours ago, it was 1895, and Grover Cleveland was President of the United States.
18) You could spend $10 million a day and it would still take you 273 years to spend $1 trillion.
19) How big is $14 TRILLION dollars? 14 trillion $1 bills, laid end to end, side to side, would pave every interstate, highway, and country road in America—twice.
20) Since 1946, spending has averaged 19.7 percent of the economy, and tax revenue has averaged 17.7 percent of the economy. While tax revenues are predicted to remain near historic levels of the economy, spending is projected to rise to more than 80 percent of the economy.
21) According to Stanford Economist John Taylor, simply to balance the budget in 2019 would require an immediate 60 percent tax increase across the board.
22) CATO estimates that if you add in the more than 100 government trust funds, revolving accounts and special accounts as well as public and intragovernmental debt and implicit debt (representing the unfunded obligations of programs such as Social Security and Medicare) the real national debt is $119.5 trillion, more than 900 percent of GDP.
23) Today, almost half (47 percent) of our public debt is owned by foreign sources, more than a 240 percent increase in the last 20 years alone. China owns more than any other nation - 29.2 percent of our debt.
24) With the interest we pay to China on our debt, China can afford to buy 3 new Joint Strike Fighters every week – with $50 million per week left over.
25) In just the last three years, the promises that Washington can’t afford to keep have grown by 80 percent, from 2008 to 2011.
26) Recently a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found nearly 10 percent of all Medicare payments are fraudulent or otherwise improper, and the government isn’t doing enough to stop them. The report estimates that the federal government is losing $48 billion on the improper payments.
27) The Government Accountability Office released a 345-page report combing the federal catalog of government programs to uncover what it said was evidence of waste and duplication that cost taxpayers, by Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) estimates, over $100 billion each year.
28) Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Veronique de Rugy, using data from the United States Department of the Treasury and the GAO to examine recently reported improper payments within the federal government. Since the implementation