It toils not, neither does it spin; and yet I say unto you, even Solomon in all his glory did not have nearly this much money. The deficit for FY2004 was about $412,553,000,000 (pdf). The debt is now (Sunday) $7,429,946,398,746.85, or a bit over $22,200 for every man, woman and child in the United States. (This is low, since we hit the debt ceiling recently, and rather than raise it right before the elections, we have been using money from the federal pension funds to pay our bills.) Since George W. Bush took office, the debt has grown by a third (the Times article just cited says 40%, but the government figures seem to indicate a lower number.)
That’s a lot of money. A lot of money. Moreover, our fiscal situation is about to get worse: the baby boom generation will be retiring soon, Social Security will stop providing us with a surplus to loot every year, and Medicare costs are going through the roof; in combination, these facts are shortly going to put a lot of pressure on our federal budget. But rather than face this problem and try to prepare for it by paying down existing debt, President Bush enacted tax cuts that have saddled us with nearly two trillion dollars in additional debt. It’s the tax cuts, more than any other factor, that drive the deficit: when you consider the change from surplus to deficit over the last four years, three times more of it is due to drops in revenue than to increases in spending, including spending on defense, homeland security, and Iraq. And while some of these revenue losses reflect the deficit, more are due to the tax cuts. If the tax cuts are made permanent, they will contribute significantly more to the national debt over the next 75 years than Social Security and Medicare combined. (cite; see table 1.)