The National Debt: The Reckoning To Come

A Washington Post editorial yesterday laid out the figures, demonstrating that the National Debt is increasing at the rate of two trillion dollars per year. The burden of interest rates on government debt has risen precipitously, tracking the increasing amount of debt to service and the extraordinarily large rise in interest rates over the past year. The U.S. Government has to pay a much higher interest rate on new borrowings than it did a year ago.

Republicans and Democrats must agree on imposing significantly higher taxes on the rich, the superrich, and corporations and even on paring social programs including Social Security and Medicare. The U.S. doesn’t have to balance the budget each year, but it must significantly reduce the annual deficit to forestall a reckoning the likes of which we’ve never seen.