Sometime early next month, the United States’ national debt will exceed $15.18 trillion. According to the Commerce Department, the nation’s gross domestic product (the market value of all goods and services produced) is only $15.17 trillion. In other words, not soon after the ball drops in Times Square, the U.S. will join Greece and Italy in the ranks of countries whose total debt obligations are larger than their entire economies. The main driver of the nation’s burgeoning debt problem is out-of-control federal spending. But while Italy and Greece have cut government outlays, federal officials in the White House and Congress have been doing the opposite. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal spending rose from $3.45 trillion in 2010 to an estimated $3.59 trillion in 2011. So much for the age of austerity.
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And just where is all the federal money going? According to the “Wastebook 2011” report by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., tax dollars were frittered away on, among many other things, video games, Christmas trees, snow cone machines, chocolate, and robot dragons. Robot dragons? Yes, the National Science Foundation recently approved a $923,000 grant for researchers to study how dragon-shaped robots can help preschoolers learn language skills.
The Coburn report also documents how our federal government blew $10 million on a remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistani children, $15.3 million on one of the infamous bridges to nowhere in Alaska, and $765,828 to subsidize “pancakes for yuppies” in the nation’s capital. In total, Coburn identified $6.9 billion worth of what can only be charitably described as government waste.
Would a $6.9 billion cut in government spending solve our debt problem? No. But the Oklahoma senator released another report the previous month titled “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous.” That report found that the approximately 3 million U.S. households reporting more than $1 million in income receive in excess of $30 billion in welfare payments and special tax breaks every year. That’s $10,000 each, but why should such households get tax breaks like $7,500 to buy a government-approved electric hybrid car?
When Republicans took control of the House following the 2010 congressional elections, they introduced a spending bill that cut $100 billion from this fiscal year’s budget. But after weeks of wrangling with President Obama and Senate Democrats headed by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, that number had been whittled down to $38 billion. More recently, Congress passed a politically expedient but fiscally idiotic two-month extension of current payroll tax rates.
If America’s leaders can’t find waste in a $3.6 trillion budget, what hope do they have of instituting real spending reform? As former Comptroller General David Walker said Friday, “If the U.S. government was a public company, the board would be calling an emergency meeting and the CEO would be conducting conference calls to calm nervous investors who might otherwise be shorting the stock and dumping their holdings in the company’s debt. It’s time for both Congress and the President to get serious and focus their attention on addressing our country’s deteriorating financial condition.” The patience of the American people is wearing thin.
