The Elephant in the Room at the DNC / RNC

The Elephant in the Room at the DNC / RNC

The View from the Middle

If you have fought your way through both the Democrat and Republican conventions with any kind of open mind, you have to be totally confused by now.  You have been told that Hillary Clinton is a cross between June Cleaver (of Leave it to Beaver fame), Eleanor Roosevelt and Mother Theresa.  This would, however, make Bill Clinton Ward Cleaver, which is an image too difficult to grasp.  Just a few days earlier, however, you were told that Hillary is a pathological liar and a cross between Vladimir Lenin and Bernie Madoff. 

At the RNC you heard that Trump is the consummate father and family man, a dynamic and utterly successful businessman and THE change agent that can save the country.  At the DNC Trump was pictured as a cross between Scrooge and Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego, Mr. Hyde.  The truth for both candidates is probably found somewhere in the middle.

We also know that neither party talked at all about the elephant in the room - our national debt. Our current debt is hovering just under $19.5 trillion dollars and this year we will add another billion and a half dollars to our debt every day.  This is the albatross that the current political class is hanging around the necks of our future generations.

Neither side bothered to tell the young people in this country that their plan is to return to trillion dollar annual deficits by 2022 and that by 2023 our national debt will be over $25 trillion.  They also neglected to tell us that the service on our debt today is only about $260 billion a year because interest rates have been so ridiculously low.  They also don’t want you to know that if interest rates return to normal levels (say 5 or 6%) by 2023, the service on our debt will be $800 billion dollars a year and will be the largest component of the budget.

At that point, interest on our debt will be a half trillion dollars a year more than it is today.  Service on that debt will be larger than our Military budget, larger than Medicare and larger than Social Security.  Where are we going to come up with an extra $500 billion a year to spend on interest payments to our debt holders? 

We can cut services!  We could reduce spending on Defense, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.  We could increase our revenues by increasing taxes or we could borrow more money from countries like China and Saudi Arabia.  Remember, Saudi Arabia just threatened to cash in $750 billion in US treasury securities and other assets if congress passed a bill allowing them to be held responsible for the 9/11/2001 attacks.  Is this the kind of blackmail our future generations can look forward to?  What would a similar but larger Chinese threat do to our economy and standing in the world?

The point is, there are no good solutions to our mountainous debt problem, and yet politicians continue to pile even more monetary obligations on to the backs of our children.  Bernie and Hillary want free college for everyone, government subsidized childcare and investments (code word for additional spending) on education and infrastructure.  All of that spending is in addition to our current plans and will only add more debt to America’s already pitiful balance sheet.

Let this be yet another warning by The View From the Middle to all Americans, but particularly to you millennials.  We can only ignore our debt for so long.  George W. Bush doubled our debt during his eight years in office and Barack Obama in on schedule to double it again over his two terms.  If we continue to bury our heads in the sand for the next eight years we will be the next Greece, but on a grand scale.  Our economy will be in a shambles and the world will have found a new safe haven for their investments.

We must all begin to make the tough decisions today.  Government is not a bottomless pit of money.  In fact, government has no money.  Every dime it spends comes from you in the form or taxes of debt it acquires in your name.  What we need is a smaller, more efficient government that lives within its means.  If we don’t take this challenge on like the greatest generation took on the Nazis in the 1940’s, we will doom our children to a future confined by debt, void of the choices we were blessed to have.