National debt grows $1 million a minute

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Now, how in the hell are we supposed to pay for this?

Cutting services may help some but it will not stop congress from spending. That's right rob the people to pay for the wars, governments contracts, NASA, Congressional Pension, Bankers mistakes, Airline bailouts, defense spending, PORK spending, etc., but don't give the people what they invested. Cut SS benefits and Medicare benefits and let everyone starve to death and live on the streets. This $#@! is getting old. I say cut congress off at the knees and let them beg for a raise. Give 'em nothing for a salary and no %%$$##@ retirement whatsoever, then see how many want to work in public service. Just pay their expenses while they are in session (let 'em eat cake); travel expenses and that's it. Put an end to all pork spending, make it illegal and punishable by public hanging on live television.

National debt grows $1 million a minute

12/3/2007, 5:55 a.m. CST

By TOM RAUM

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day — or nearly $1 million a minute.

What's that mean to you?

It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.

Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion.

And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt — now at relatively low interest rates — rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.

So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind.

But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending — leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above.

A major economic slowdown, as some economists suggest may be looming, could hasten the day of reckoning.

The national debt — the total accumulation of annual budget deficits — is up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009.

That's $10,000,000,000,000.00, or one digit more than an odometer-style "national debt clock" near New York's Times Square can handle. When the privately owned automated clock was activated in 1989, the national debt was $2.7 trillion.

http://www.al.com/newsflash/washington/ind...list=washington