debt

The Congressional Budget Office just estimated that the federal budget deficit would reach $425 billion this year. That’s an additional $1,300 of debt for each American man, woman and child.

As is clear from the rise of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina in the Republican presidential primaries and the groundswell of support for socialist Bernie Sanders among Democrats, a large portion of the American public has become fed up with the national government’s apparent takeover by powerful special-interest groups. Each new day brings another story of bad legislation and worse court decisions giving certain classes of people advantages denied to the rest of the people.

The entirety of the United States is now a federal disaster area – rendered thus by Washington, D.C. Unlike areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes and other acts of God – our cataclysm is entirely man-made. Decades of anti-Reality policies have left our nation an uber-addled mess.

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico owes more than $70 billion—about $19,729.43 per resident—in debt to creditors and investors. First to note the territory’s fiscal problems were the credit rating agencies, which downgraded the territory’s bond status to “speculative,” the first of three steps along the junk-bond path to loan default.

Reckless government spending and an uncontrollable federal debt have created an unavoidable monetary disaster ahead. The door to unlimited federal spending was opened by President Nixon in 1971 when he severed the last link between the dollar and gold by ending foreign central banks’ ability to exchange dollars for U.S. gold. Politicians realized that more spending produced more votes to keep them in office; and with no limit on federal spending, the mountain of debt just kept on growing.

For months, now, the mass media and the financial markets have anxiously watched and waited to see the outcome of a war of words, accusations, and threats that have been fought between Greece and its Eurozone and European Union partners.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Jesse Hathaway, managing editor of Budget & Tax News speaks with Bill Bergman. Bergman is the vice president of Truth in Accounting. Bergman joins Hathaway to talk about a new report on the federal government’s “credit card statement.”

One of the challenges the seemingly never-ending list of Republican presidential candidates must face in what is sure to be an all-out political brawl in 2016 is finding a unique way to explain that America does not have a tax revenue problem; it has a massive spending addiction.

Some of my right-leaning heroes (insofar as politicians are worthy of being heroes) are ganging up with other politicos to support the dull-sounding but pernicious policy of a federal unit-record system for higher education. The skinny: This bugger would expand federal cradle-to-grave surveillance of we, the people, and further centralize our already micromanaged economy. And Rep. Paul Ryan, Sen. Marco Rubio, and Rep. Mia Love are leading cosponsors. Jigga what?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported in early May that for the month of April 2015 the Federal government ran a budget surplus, taking in more in taxes than it laid out in expenditures. Don’t be fooled by one month, especially when it was a month when people filed and pay their taxes. Government deficits and growing debt are on the horizon for as far as the human eye can predict.

Unless local and state governments act now, a tsunami of underfunded public pension plan obligations will soon rush ashore and drown taxpayers with tax hikes and crippling debt.

For the past year or so, there has been no statutory limit on how much the federal government borrows. The debt ceiling was abandoned in the last budget deal. But in the coming weeks, it is scheduled to return—along with the predictable illusion of a debate over whether to lift the ceiling or not.

This is part 7 of the 8 part series establishing that the laser-focus of the Compact for America approach to organizing an Article V convention with the specific job advancing and ratifying a pre-drafted, specific federal Balanced Budget Amendment is clearly, unequivocally, and overwhelmingly what the Founders expected from the state-originated amendment process.