WASHINGTON   –  “With so many zeroes, the national debt is a tough number to pin down.  But even slight revisions to our $13.6 trillion debt totaling tenths or even hundredths of a percent in 2010 are really shock waves to our economy and our security.

One-hundredth of one percent of our national debt today still totals well more than a billion dollars.

So when a Treasury Department report last week revised the expected U.S. debt to reach $19.6 trillion in 2015, the economy shuddered.  I shuddered.  We should all take notice.

At $19.6 trillion, our debt in 2015 would total 102 percent of our national gross domestic product.  Our debt would be worth more than every good and service our country can produce in a single year.  As a nation, that not only makes us vulnerable, it also means we are voluntarily using debt to finance the expansion of government to an unprecedented size and cost. 

The $6 billion in debt this administration predicts the United States will issue in the next five years is a massive amount of spending.  It covers everything from the health care law to the stimulus to maintaining stimulus-like levels of government spending to the growing cost of programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  It also covers the luxuries of ignoring reforms that would force government to operate within its means, of reforming entitlements now so benefits are not threatened later, and of risking our position as the world’s lone superpower. A $19.6 trillion national debt demands our attention.

There is a tiny bit of good news to this number – it is not all money we have spent, it is also money the Obama Administration plans to spend.  We have an opportunity and a responsibility to change that plan.
Seventy-nine percent of Americans view the federal debt as a very serious threat to the future well-being of the country – and the debt is tied with the threat of terrorism for that distinction.

Meanwhile, the liberal leadership in Congress has yet to produce a budget for the government this year.  It is widely assumed they will simply fail to do so.  Yet this is the most basic level of transparency the American people deserve: a plan, a blueprint for how our tax dollars will be spent.  The plans for 12 appropriations bills, the legislation that actually funds the government, are similarly veiled.

We also deserve a plan for debt reduction – action items I have pressed for in Congress like calling back stimulus funding, cutting federal agencies’ budgets, and ending the Troubled Asset Relief Program right now. 

Calls for a budget, for responsible fiscal practices and for debt reduction are coming from members of both parties in Congress, and they are getting louder.  The American people understand that out-of-control debt is just as serious as terrorism.  Congress should not only share this concern, it should act upon it.”