Soviet dictator Josef Stalin famously said, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." The same principle – that the public can more easily grasp a small tragedy than a huge one – can be applied to budget matters. Americans can get rightly riled about a public official who misuses several thousand of their hard-earned dollars, but it's harder to get them riled about more massive abuses. A thousand bucks is a tragedy, whereas trillions of dollars are too hard to comprehend, let alone to get angry over. Well, Americans better learn to get angry soon, given that the federal debt has now hit nine trillion dollars, which is a heck of a lot of money, even by government standards. That debt, which includes obligations such as Treasury bonds, T-bills and T-notes, has soared from $5.6 trillion when George W. Bush took office. The president so far has pushed to increase the debt limit five times during his presidency, making the current debt limit $9.8 trillion. At current trends, especially with the rate of spending to fund the Iraq war, it won't be too long before President Bush is asking to increase that limit again.
When will it stop? The annual budget deficit also is a problem, although $163 billion dollars sounds tiny compared with numbers followed by a dozen zeroes. These numbers reflect an amazing amount of red ink, a testament to the way the federal government continues to grow and to the way politicians – especially Republicans – recognize no bounds to the amount of money the government can borrow and spend. It's ironic that although, rhetorically speaking, the Democratic Party is the party of big government, in reality, the Republican Party at the national level has proved itself to be the true party of bigger and more expensive government.
The Libertarian Party noted, in a statement released Thursday, "It took from George Washington to Ronald Reagan for the national debt to hit the $1 trillion mark – a period of more than 190 years. Now, 27 years later, the national debt has risen more than 800 percent under three Republicans and one Democratic president. However, only $1.2 trillion of national debt was accrued during President Bill Clinton's administration, meaning the bulk of national debt comes from Republican administrations."
It's about time for candidates in the two major parties to stop making promises about how much more of your money they want to spend and start outlining serious plans to rein the deficit and the debt.