Off the Publisher’s Desk 6-11-25

We bonded our great-grandchildren!

Our great nation is in debt so far that our descendants are now left on the hook for the debt that the United States of America has accumulated.

I don’t know if Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will add to that debt, but the people we have elected to Congress, neither Republican nor Democrat, seem to be concerned with spending and not controlling the spending of the federal government.

The interest on the current debt is more than we spend on our defense and there is no end in sight.

The following is a piece that appeared in the June 3rd edition of the Capitol Guardian about our national debt.

“If Congress does nothing — by that, it is meant does not make any changes to existing law — and the $36.2 trillion national debt will spiral up to close to $53 trillion by 2034, according to a 2024 estimate by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). That’s another $17 trillion, and optimistically assumes no wars or recessions. This will be the case even if the current legislation to extend and expand the 2017 Trump tax cuts were to somehow be defeated or mitigated to include another $2.3 trillion of spending cuts — say, by enacting the DOGE cuts of $175 billion or so every year — to keep it deficit neutral over the next decade. In other words, tax bill or no tax bill, DOGE cuts or no DOGE cuts, the debt is basically expected to rise by another $17 trillion over the next decade. So, who’s going to buy all those treasuries? U.S. Financial institutions, retirement funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, that’s who: rising from about 17 percent in 2008, or $1.7 trillion, to $15.6 trillion, or 43.2 percent of the $36.2 trillion debt today. That number just keeps going up and up. In 2023, it was 38 percent. Nothing currently under consideration — whether the 2023 sequestration, the current schemes of continuing resolutions and omnibus bills, the current budget baseline or the budget reconciliation plan that carries forward current tax law — really does much to change the current trajectory. Congress is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t — and U.S. banks and taxpayers will be the ones left with the bag at the end of the day.”

So, if we all could start a savings account for our unborn great-great grandchildren, they may be able to handle what we have left them.

It was suggested this past weekend that what is needed is a third political party and I might have agreed to something like that to control our debt, but something is needed.

If we allow our national government to go broke, there will be no social programs, no Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. So maybe we should all be concerned that we might need to have a garden in our back yard.

Thanks for reading!     ~Carlton