Examiner.com: US economy - Obama administration adding $3 million per minute to national debt - by

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US Economy: Obama administration adding $3 million per minute to national debt - by Jarid Brown

The Obama Administration and congressional Democrats have done an outstanding job of breaking down uninsured statistics into smaller more understandable numbers such as their 14,000 newly uninsured claim. Yet, when it comes to deficits and the national debt, no one in Washington seems to want the public to understand just how much money they are spending. Politicians talk in dollar amounts that no American, even the richest among us, will ever truly comprehend.

The Obama administration released in the past 2 weeks revised projections that the 2009 deficit will amount to just shy of $1.6 Trillion dollars and that their long term budget projections will create $9 Trillion dollars of deficits in the next ten years. More than a year ago for another organization, we excoriated the Bush Administration for years of unchecked government spending culminating in the single largest deficit in US history. At the time, that budget deficit of half a Trillion dollars amounted to over $1 million dollars a minute in new national debt; an debt level that simply is not sustainable. With no balance of power in Washington this year, the drunken spending of politicians has tripled the record breaking Bush deficit, creating a phenomenal $3 million of new national debt every single minute (not total government spending, but new government debt). As a result, during the 8 hours of time you will spend at work today, the US government will go more than $1.4 billion into debt.

With a national debt approaching $19 trillion dollars, US taxpayers would be forced to pay a minimum of $950 billion per year in interest on such debt. That amount would be based upon the US government's ability to finance debt at a 5% rate, which historically would be unlikely, considering the debt to GDP ratios. In order to finance the debt, the government would have to pay higher interest rates and as a result those interest payments alone would likely swell to as much as $1.5 trillion per year. Further complicating the nation's ability to finance the US government's lust for debt, is the fact that more than 2 years ago, rating agencies issued warnings that the United States debt ration was likely to lead to a credit rating downgrade. Such a downgrade from our AAA status, would devalue the dollar and force an even larger rise in interest rates as lenders demand higher rates due to a greater risk of default. To reiterate a point, those warnings were first issued before the record deficits of the past two years.

By 2019, the US national debt will have become so large that the very longevity of the US will be at risk. The United States is the 800 KG. giant in the world's economy and the nation that time and time again has come to the rescue of others when their monetary systems have collapsed. Unfortunately, if the US monetary system collapsed under the weight of this unsustainable debt, there will be no nation capable of rescuing the US financial system.