As it once stood, only a short while ago, every American man, woman, and child would have had to pay $37,000 in order to pay off the $11.5 trillion debt. This year, however, $1.086 trillion has been added to the deficit…with three months in the fiscal year to go.  Now, roughly $42,000 per individual is owed to the government. A bale of hay has been dropped on the proverbial camel when a straw was all it would have taken to break its back.

This fact doesn’t phase President Obama however. On the same day as this figure was announced, he put pressure on Congress to pass a $1 trillion health care package funded by…you guessed it…tax payers. All this is only the beginning according to Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "Under the Obama budget, America would borrow $9 trillion more over the next decade. These trillion-dollar deficits will become as routine as the high interest rates, steep taxes and economic stagnation they bring," he said.

Though exceeding our spending capacity is nothing new, it has reached an astronomic high. The last time America was this far in debt the nation was paying off loans from World War II.  Since then, however, the dollar has taken a steep turn and is no longer something foreigners are eager to invest in. Even the Chinese, the biggest foreign holder of dollars, appears to be growing concerned and the administration has been at pains to reassure the communist government in Beijing. “Geithner has sought to reassure China, the largest foreign holder of Treasuries, that its investments are safe, while also seeking to reassure U.S. voters that the government has a plan to get its debt under control” stated Bloomberg in a report on Wednesday.

Regardless of whether or not American debt is swallowed up by investors, the underlying fact is that Americans will somehow have to pay for it. Economists "argue that the only way that can be done is through some combination of spending cuts, especially in the government's big entitlement programs, and tax increases,” reports the Associated Press. Meanwhile, left-leaning economists and politicians insist that such spending is necessary, stating a need for welfare programs for the growing number of jobless, stimulus packages, and foreign aid.

What they don’t realize is that while some of these programs help certain members of the United States, they only serve to hurt Americans as a whole in the long run — and they are certainly of questionable constitutionality, to put it mildly. As the net worth of America decreases by the trillions, and national debt grows by trillions, the closer Americans get to putting in a full day of work and giving everything they earn to someone else.  Slavery is something Americans cannot afford.  

Photo Credit: GNU Free Documentation License <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Catherine Mullins is a freelance writer and essayist.

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us and them said:

	... we deserve everything we get we vote these people in they screw us over we vote them in again. The chicoms calling in their chips would be the best thing that happened to the average american. Please China don't lend us anymore money and expose what our politicians have truly done to us. then start building the gallows...
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July 18, 2009
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MarkGlen said:

	Inflation In 2005 I bought a loaf of store brand bread for .88 cents. Yesterday, 2009, I purchased a loaf of store brand bread for $1.34. This means, in rounded off figures, that the Dollar has lost 52.% of its purchasing power in 4 years. Now, with all the fiat money places in circulation by Bush and Obama in the past year inflation will mushroom.
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July 22, 2009 | url
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