It’s mighty tempting to look at the current shutdown/debt-ceiling fight as some kind of perverse abstraction, and to dismiss all of the hijinks on Capitol Hill and in the White House as exhibitions happening merely for their own political sakes — i.e., to completely divorce it all from the real reason we’re actually here right now. We are a stone’s throw away from$17 trillion in national debt, with absolutely zero plans to even just stop aggressively addingto that number, let alone come anywhere close to simply breaking even. So many liberals are so blithely convinced that ‘we face no impending debt crisis’ and that the simple legislative act of once again raising the debt ceiling has no substantive reason to devolve into such a circus — but here’s a handy little chart to consider, first posted by the Weekly Standard from the Senate Budget Committee:
…When the Treasury department started using so-called extraordinary measures to avoid a breach of the debt ceiling in May, 2011, the debt limit stood at $14,294 billion.“Today it stands at $16,699 billion, which was reached when Treasury started using extraordinary measures in May of this year. That’s a $2,405 billion increase in 2 years.“Meanwhile, the economy, as measured by GDP only increased by $1,199 billion between the second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of this year.
Read: The amount of debt we incurred over the past two years was double the amount of wealth we added to our GDP; or, the rate at which our debt is growing is two times the rate at which our economy is growing — and Democrats’ only proffered solutions to this entirely unsustainable scenario are 1) increasing government spending and 2) raising taxes. Awesome.
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