Budget Deficit

With much fanfare, President Obama created a Deficit Panel yesterday for the purpose of finding bipartisan solutions to the exploding federal budget deficit and national debt.  The official name of the Deficit Panel is the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”.  That name is obviously too long for most people to remember, so already journalists are using shorter names to identify the panel.  In this article, I’m using the term Deficit Panel, but you may also see or hear it referred to as the Debt Panel, the Deficit Commission, the Debt Reduction Commission, the Deficit Reduction Commission, and other similar names. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Debt Clock was erected in New York City’s Times Square in 1989, when the national debt was just $2.7 trillion.  In 2004, the National Debt Clock was moved from its original location on 42^nd Street to its current location on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas), about a block away.

The National Debt Clock keeps a running total of the total federal government debt, and also calculates each American family’s share of the national debt.  The National Debt Clock was the Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama has released revised budget projections, and they show another record deficit for the federal budget.  The budget deficit for the 2009 fiscal year was a record of $1.4 trillion, but the projected deficit for fiscal year 2010 is projected to set a new record at almost $1.6 trillion.  In 2011, the Administration expects the deficit to decline to “just” $1.3 trillion.

Looking down the road past 2011, the Obama Administration projects that the deficit will Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama’s first year is in the books, so it seems like an appropriate time to see how he is handling the National Debt.  When President Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the National Debt stood at just under $10.627 trillion.  On his one-year anniversary of January 20, 2010, the National Debt totaled just over $12.327 trillion.

That means the National Debt has increased by a whopping $1.7 trillion during his first year in office.  That is the largest single year increase of any President in the history of the United States.

It will be interesting to see what the second year holds.

The U.S. Treasury Department reported yesterday that the federal budget deficit hit an all-time high for the month of December 2009.  The deficit for December totalled $91.85 billion, the largest December deficit ever recorded.  Additionally, the budget deficit for the first three months of the current budget year (which began on October 1, 2009) was larger than last year’s record deficit. Read the rest of this entry »

Health Care Reform is a worthy goal, and most Americans agree that some type of health care reform is needed.   But can our nation afford President Obama’s version of health care reform?  What will it do to our budget deficit and national debt?

Official projections are that it will reduce the budget deficit and the national debt because of cost savings and efficiencies.  In this article, I want to put forth an opposing point of view.  I believe that this health care reform will ultimately prove to cause dramatic increases in the budget deficit and the national debt.  There are two reasons I believe this. Read the rest of this entry »