The Daily Gamecock

Staggering national debt should concern all

Historical allusions could spell trouble for America’s future

$16,808,315,191,162.

This jaw-dropping figure is our total national debt, at least when I started writing this article, and it’s a number we should find important. Members on both sides of the aisle often reference this number in debating how to deal with our current financial crises — like the sequester or why we haven’t passed a federal budget since 2009. But before we can really discuss why the debt even matters, we need to understand what this number means and how it got so high.

Since our country’s foundation, the difference between the amount of money the federal government spends and receives is called an annual surplus or deficit. Until recently, the national debt hovered around 25 percent of gross domestic product during most of the 20th century, spiking during both of the World Wars and Great Depression. While we had paid WWII debt down to 30 percent of GDP, when former President Ronald Reagan took office, his economic policies, commonly known as “Reaganomics,” created major increases in expenditures with no new income.

Through subsequent administrations, these policies managed to increase the debt to 70 percent of our nation’s GDP — dropping down to about 55 percent under former President Bill Clinton’s economic policies — but took a turn for the worse as we entered the new millennium.
Back then, we as a nation made a bipartisan decision to run up “Debt Mountain” as fast as we could. Former President George W. Bush left office with the debt at more than 80 percent of GDP and President Barack Obama increased it even further, taking it over 100 percent for the first time since WWII.

We’ve already seen many of the effects of this massive debt, namely in the form of higher prices for everyday purchases. If you’ve ever wondered why the prices of everyday common goods keep rising, you can thank inflation, a phenomenon where money loses value over time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we’ve seen 35 percent inflation since 2000 — meaning prices have increased an average of 35 percent in that time.

We’ll be lucky if inflation is the only impact we see from our growing debt. Debt is the destroyer of empires. It’s a common thread between the collapse of great powers like Carthage, Rome, Spain and France, among others. And don’t think for a moment that debt is an “old” problem modern nations no longer face. It was one of the leading factors in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a mounting debt toppled Greece in 2010.
As citizens, we’re playing the world’s most dangerous game of “hot potato” by merely passing a debt bomb from generation to generation. It’s almost our generation’s turn to catch the potato ­— will we make the changes necessary to stop the clock, or will we just hope it doesn’t go off until we can pass it to the next generation?


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