The Washington Post offers a graphic illustration that compares the projected deficits under President Obama to those under President Bush. It's pretty stark ... and frightening. Imagine that you owed far more on your credit card than you could ever pay and every month the interest kept increasing the total. Your credit rating falls as you fail to pay your bills, you lose your home, car and insurance coverage, you're unable to buy clothes or food for your children and no one will lend you any more money.
This is the situation we will soon be in as a nation when the bills start arriving from President Obama's great spending spree. Astonishingly, he himself admitted last week that our debt is unsustainable. Here's part of the Bloomberg story:
President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending "unsustainable," warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.
"We can't keep on just borrowing from China," Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. "We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children's future with more and more debt."
Holders of U.S. debt will eventually "get tired" of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. "It will have a dampening effect on our economy."
Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year's budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously.
It makes me wonder if Mr. Obama suffers from multiple personality disorder. Who does he think is responsible for plunging us into this debt? Is he battling some other personality for control of his spending impulses? Is there no one in his administration who can urge him to be more responsible? Is there no one who could manage the equivalent of taking a scissors to his credit cards?
The man should be attending meetings of the governmental equivalent of shoppers anonymous, but instead he keeps running up massive debt while warning us that we just can't afford it any more. This is how an alcoholic behaves. The addict keeps on drinking while bemoaning the fact that he's ruining his life and killing his body.
In the President's case, however, it's not his life he's ruining. It's our children's lives which are being devastated by his profligacy. This is what one gets when one votes for someone just because he promises Hope and Change.
RLC