Running up the tab

Congress and the administration continue to borrow as if there is no tomorrow, and so it is necessary to point out from time to time that tomorrow will come -- and with it the debts that the United States has been running up will come due.
That debt stands at about $8.5 trillion, of which large shares are held by foreign nations that have been selling us more of their goods than they have been buying of ours. Trillions more we owe to ourselves, as part of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds (for more on when those debts will come due, see the column on the page opposite this).
Late last week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that this year's deficit "will be significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps as low as $300 billion." As recently as February, the White House had been estimating the deficit at $423 billion.
A smaller deficit is certainly to be welcomed, but not celebrated. The Senate, however, celebrated this good news by passing a $108.9 billion version of an "emergency" spending bill that President Bush had asked Congress to keep to $94.5 billion.
The bill covers costs for the war in Iraq, hurricane relief along the Gulf Coast and prevention of a bird flu pandemic and several billion in pet projects deemed emergencies by wily senators.
Exceptions noted
Even while voting for the bill, Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, made some sobering observations.
He noted that when he came to the Senate in 1999, the national debt stood at $5.6 trillion. Today, it is $8.4 trillion. That is an increase of 50 percent. As a percentage of gross domestic product, the national debt has grown from being 58 percent of gross domestic production at the end of 2000 to an estimated 66 percent of gross domestic production by the end of 2006.
Meanwhile, 7 cents of every dollar spent goes to pay interest on the national debt, and that is relatively low. As interest rates increase, the cost of borrowing will increase.
To head off a potential fiscal disaster in 10 or 20 years, changes are going to have to be made now. But neither the Congress or the president seem inclined to do so. They continue to borrow and spend, ignoring the inevitable fact that it is the citizens of tomorrow who will have to pay the price.