What The Reagan/Bush Debt Means To You
Huffington Post
Dave Johnson
December 8, 2007

As I write this, the U.S. national debt is about $9.17 TRILLION dollars. This debt is the amount we have borrowed to pay for our government since the Reagan tax cuts -- compounded by the Bush tax cuts. This is because of a choice we made -- yes, I say WE, because this government is US -- to borrow and pay later instead of pay now.

Don't for a minute think that you do not owe that money. It comes to about $30,000 for each American, including infants. If you are a family of four you now owe about $120,000 thanks to those tax cuts. YOU owe this money, even though the tax cuts have primarily gone to the very rich. You WILL be paying it, one way or another. Don't think that debt like that just goes away.

PLUS, now each year we pay about $433 billion for interest on that debt. That amount, of course, rises every year. So in addition to owing all that money we have to service the debt by paying $433 billion every year. That amount is larger than the current federal deficit -- which means if we had not cut those taxes and borrowed all that money in the past we would have $433 billion more each year to spend or save AND we would not owe $9 trillion.

I do not understand how we tolerate this situation. Yes, it happened because we listened to lies, but how many of our candidates are seriously talking about the changes that need to be made to fix this?

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