We are told that America’s debt is standing at $15 trillion. The truth is that is that is just a portion of our rapidly increasing debt. Many people do not know that America’s total debt stands at $57 trillion dollars. This “total debt” consists of America’s “unfunded liabilities,” in other words, government run programs.
Adding these two numbers together, America has a total of $72 trillion worth of obligations that we either own to foreign countries or to our own people, or that we simply have not yet set aside. To put this amount of money in perspective, if you were to add up one trillion seconds it would be equivalent to 32,000 years. That would make 72 trillion seconds equivalent to 2,304,000 years.
With this flabbergasting statistic in mind, the question arises: Why is the government in so much debt? The answer partially seems to be because the American mindset has become “the government owes us everything.”
But does it?
When a college student proclaims that it is the government’s job to grant them their treasured student loan, do they know that America’s student loan debt stands at $869 million? They may accept this statistic, but do they thoroughly realize that their share of the national debt stands at $182,000? Maybe not so much.
The mindset that the government owes us practically everything may be the one thing that causes the demise of our great country. This mindset has to change. If our families only made 100,000 dollars a year, would we go out using their credit card and buy a 150,000 dollar Ferrari? The repercussions of this would be great…and so would the credit card debt.
So why do we expect this of our government?
The problem with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is that their funding mechanism are no longer workable. The government is no longer able to pay the price of taking care of every medical need of every American. Even though the money for these programs is automatically taken out of our hard earned pay checks, the government has not handled the money as it should. Even if the government taxed every American 100%, it would not be able to pay off all of the debt amassed by these three programs. The government is no longer capable of this task and the bad thing is, it doesn’t even seem to know it.
Currently, our elected officials think that it helps to pass bills that add billions of dollars to our debt and pass legislation for new government programs that only add to the problem. However, it is our job to turn the government around. The government will listen to the people, or the people will make the government listen through the elections.
Janine Turner says that America has become a “Give me Liberty, and Give Me, Give Me” society. Yet we cannot have both liberty and a government that gives us everything for free. We are at the tipping point. With this much debt and no clear way out, we are the most vulnerable to losing all of our liberties and our country as a whole.
About Juliette Turner
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