I fear that this enormous burden of debt threatens our currency. I fear that another 2008-style panic is possible, and I fear that this degree of debt is an imminent threat to our national security.
You cannot project power from bankruptcy court. It does not make us appear stronger when we borrow money from China and send it to countries that burn our flag.
The President seems to think we can keep adding to a $16 trillion debt. The President seems to think the country can continue to borrow $50,000 per second.
The President believes that we should just squeeze more money out of those who are working. He's got it exactly backwards. I'm here to tell you, what we need to do is leave more money in the pockets of those who earned it.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the public debt will increase in the current fiscal year by an additional $949 billion. That comes to $30,093 per second. Now, that per-second figure was considerably higher earlier in the Obama administration. In 2011 the U.S. was borrowing $47,564.68 every second. We don't mean to minimize the scope of the nation's debt problem. But Paul is wrong to suggest the president will "continue to borrow $50,000 every second," when CBO projects the U.S. will borrow about 40 percent less than that this fiscal year.
The path we are on is not sustainable, but few in Congress or in this Administration seem to recognize that their actions are endangering the prosperity of this great nation.
All that we are, all that we wish to be is now threatened by the notion that you can have something for nothing, that you can have your cake and eat it too, that you can spend a trillion dollars every year that you don't have.
Congress is debating the wrong things. Every debate in Washington is about how much to increase spending--a little or a lot. About how much to increase taxes--a little or a lot. Only in Washington could an increase of $7 trillion in spending over a decade be called a cut.
Not only should the sequester stand, many pundits say the sequester really needs to be at least $4 trillion to avoid another downgrade of America's credit rating.
Both parties will have to agree to cut, or we will never fix our fiscal mess.
Bipartisanship is not what is missing in Washington. Common sense is. Trillion-dollar deficits hurt us all. Printing more money to feed the never-ending appetite for spending hurts us all. We pay higher prices every time we go to the supermarket or the gas pump. The value of the dollar shrinks with each new day.
At best, our current policies are merely slowing down our fast-approaching default. We are borrowing $40,000 per second. Entitlements and interest will consume the entire budget within a decade. When they say the appointed Super Committee that was part of the 2011 budget deal will cut $2 trillion, what they really mean is that it will cut $2 trillion from proposed increases in spending. So instead of adding $9 trillion to the debt over 10 years, we will merely add $7 trillion. Suffice it to say, this is not a cut. Only in Washington can the accumulation of so much new debt be seen as fiscal responsibility