Our Real National Debt

In recent weeks, America's focus has been on the $13 trillion dollar Federal debt that has been accumulated as of last month. But, in reality, our national debt is a lot higher. If you take all the states and their fiscal irresponsibility, we might be talking about another one-and-a-half trillion dollars or more in actual debt burden. For example, California has a long-term debt in excess of $87 billion. New Jersey has a $51 billion debt load and it is quite a bit smaller than California. New York is $67.5 billion in the hole. In Illinois, the debt clock is at $106 billion and counting. In just those four "blue" states, alone, the total combined debt is one-third of a trillion dollars; and, the state by state debt clocks in the rest of our 46 states just keep running with no end in sight.

This country is in an absolute debt crisis and many of the state legislatures continue to push the it even higher with more and more costly social programs. ObamaCare, itself, has pushed billions more in debt onto the states as a result of the expansion of Medicaid. That's because the cost to cover each new Medicaid patient is equally shared between the states and the Federal government. Also, as more and more Americans lose their jobs, the state and federal tax revenues continue to fall; pushing the debt even higher.

All of our governments -- state, local, and federal -- have put us in a financial jam that can only be resolved by paying substantially higher taxes. At the same time, the government workers continue to get fat salaries and pensions and won't budge an inch on cuts to those luxurious payouts. We should all be concerned that we might not, at some point, be able to even pay the interest on our debt. Further, we should be concerned that there may come a day when no one, especially China, will be willing to float our debt through bond offerings.

If we are going to save this country, we need to do it in the fall with the mid-term elections and stop the Democrats before they pass anymore wasteful power-grab legislation. Never has an election been so important. Not only do we need to "throw the bums out" at the Federal level, we need to do the same at the state and local levels too.