Obama will borrow one quarter of what he plans to spend this year. The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner lays it all out in spades for you here. In that Cato by far does the best policy research in the country, Cato is always my first source when I am searching for the inside track on issues vital to Americans. And in that Cato is explicitly not aligned with political parties, you get the least biased research you can find anywhere. This is why Debbie and I are active benefactors of the Cato Institute.
OK, so the fiscal picture is grizzly and being overseen by the wrong person. If you are a small business owner or retired and trying to earn a living from interest on treasuries, bank interest and CDs, you already know the tragic story. Mr. Tanner writes that America’s national debt hit $16.4 trillion this month. America has added $2.1 trillion to the debt since the last time, as Mr. Tanner notes, we promised to cut spending as a trade-off for agreeing to more debt! Even confiscating all the income of billionaires and millionaires would not cover the post-fiscal-cliff-deal deficit.
I have been writing that America’s problem is spending—period! The subject of revenues should not even be on the table. Income taxes as a percent of GDP today stand at much the same levels as when I graduated from Babson College in 1963. Spending as a percent of GDP has blown through the roof. My message to our profligate, Marxist-oriented administration is no increase in the debt limit. Americans need to tell their elected politicians that each will need a new line of work if the spending madness does not stop now.
