Interest On US Debt = $4.8 Trillion

Remember when PresBo projected the budget deficits for the next decade based upon his profligate spending habits? According to those projections, the national debt will increase by $9 trillion over the next decade. And more than half of that debt we accumulate, $4.8 trillion to be precise, will be interest payments on our existing debt.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/19/news/economy/debt_interest/index.htm

Here's a new way to think about the U.S. government's epic borrowing: More than half of the $9 trillion in debt that Uncle Sam is expected to build up over the next decade will be interest.

More than half. In fact, $4.8 trillion.

If that's hard to grasp, here's another way to look at why that's a problem.

In 2015 alone, the estimated interest due - $533 billion - is equal to a third of the federal income taxes expected to be paid that year, said Charles Konigsberg, chief budget counsel of the Concord Coalition, a deficit watchdog group.

Ask any debt counselor... when you have to borrow money so you can make payments on existing debt, this is a bad sign of impending financial doom. And that's precisely what we're doing. And as bad as it looks now, it will probably get worse.

But accumulating any more interest on what the United States owes at this point is like extreme sport: dangerous.

All the more so because interest rates will rise when private sector borrowers return to the debt market and compete with the government for capital. At that point, the country's interest payments could jack up very fast.

"When interest rates rise even a small amount, the interest payments go up a lot because of the size of the debt," Konigsberg said.

The Congressional Budget Office, which made the $4.8 trillion forecast, already baked some increase in rates into the cake. But there is always a chance those estimates may prove too conservative.

PresBo has been talking a bit recently about having to reduce deficits, though it's clear from his spending habits that he doesn't really mean it. The problem is that the yearly deficits aren't the whole problem. Sure, reducing the deficits would help, but I'm not sure that there is such a thing as a "sustainable deficit" anymore. We are so far in debt that interest on that debt is consuming an ever-larger portion of our budget... and it will only get worse as the debt increases.

We need to do more than just "reduce the deficit"... our government needs to start spending LESS than it collects in tax revenue and start PAYING DOWN THE DEBT! We can't keep going deeper and deeper into debt forever... even a little rational thought should be sufficient to realize that!

It's time and past time to make the hard decisions to start reducing the size and cost of government to the point where we can start paying down the debt. We're not at the danger point yet, but it would be a REALLY good idea to act BEFORE that danger point is reached.