Growing national debt should get more attention

Here we go again.
Sometime next month, Congress will be asked once again to increase the nation's statutory debt limit -- not that it can possibly say no.
It would have been done already, but Treasury Secretary John Snow came up with a clever way to buy time: He began borrowing from the federal employees' retirement fund. That's akin to borrowing from your brother (without asking him) until you get a chance to go to the bank for (yet) another mortgage.
Amazingly, Democrats protested timidly, and Republicans, who used to boast about being members of a fiscally responsible party, said not a word.
Apparently the only people who are concerned about the cumulative effects of massive deficit spending are people on the fringe -- among them a handful of editorial writers. Nonetheless, the latest ugly chapters in U.S. budget history deserve mention.
The nation's statutory debt limit is $8.184 trillion. When Snow came within about $10 billion of that figure, he began tapping the retirement fund. That's not the first time this has been done. But by contrast, when President Clinton's treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, did it in 1996, House Republicans threatened to impeach Rubin. Many of those Republicans are still in Congress, but silent now.
Another difference is that Clinton was committed to reducing deficit spending, and by the time he left office, the 2000 budget showed a surplus.
50 percent increase
President Bush inherited that surplus and a debt limit of $5.7 trillion. Using the administration's own budget projections, by the time President Bush completes his second term, the debt will be about $8.6 trillion. That will be an increase of 50 percent on the president's watch.
When Ronald Reagan took office 25 years ago, the debt was less than $1 trillion.
While Snow's temporary tactic of taking money from the retirement fund is like borrowing without permission, running up enormous debt is like stealing money out of the children's' piggy bank.
It is the children and grandchildren of today's taxpayers who will have to repay this debt -- with interest. Based on present debt and likely average weighted interest rates of about 5 percent, the interest on the federal debt will be more than $400 billion in fiscal 2006.
As borrowing continues, interest rates will have nowhere to go but up. Nothing good will come of higher interest rates -- not to efforts to balance the budget or to the economic health of the nation.
And as we've noted before in editorials about the trade deficit, trillions of dollars in U.S. debt is now held by those nations that flood our markets with cheap goods and expensive oil. As foreign holdings of U.S. government notes increase, the administration loses some of its ability to make independent decisions on matters of trade and foreign policy.
It is time for more people to begin looking at the growing national debt with serious concern, if not alarm.