Posted By Neal Boortz On March 9, 2010 (6:25 am) In Voices and Choices

There is one thing that Democrats, Republicans and Independents can all agree on – the debt we owe is our greatest long-term threat to national security. By a two-to-one margin, Americans of all demographics and political parties believe that the amount of money we owe to China is now a greater long-term threat than radical Islam. They’re right, but it’s must worse than that. The level of debt facing this country will destroy the dreams of our children and grandchildren. It is hard to imagine that future generations will have the opportunity to pursue anything close to the lifestyle we enjoy as they are faced with this crushing debt to retire.

Just how bad is this problem? Read on …..

Last Friday, the Congressional Budget office released a report stating that our projected debt is actually going to be much higher than the White House predicted. Wow! Now who didn’t see THAT coming? The CBO says that Obama’s budget is going to lead to annual deficits averaging $1 trillion for the next decade. The White House’s prediction was an annual budget shortfall of $853 billion for the next decade. Why the discrepancy? Obama expects to bring in more tax revenue. The CBO, on the other hand, does not believe the Obama economy will be able to generate the tax revenue because it expects less economic growth. In fact, the CBO predicts that the deficit will never fall below 4% of the GDP under Obama’s policies and “would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.”

(By the way, as of right now our predicted annual deficit for this year is $1.5 trillion – a post WWII record at 10.3% of our economy.)

But back to this report … the CBO says that deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90% of the economy by 2020, while interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.

Speaking of interest rates, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell puts our interest rates into perspective. He says, ” … in just four years the administration predicts the government will have to spend more just to pay interest on the federal debt than it spends on the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, HUD (Housing and Urban Development), Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Treasury, and the Corps of Engineers, Environment Protection Agency, GSA (General Services Administration), NASA, National Science Foundation, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration — combined.”