From Bloomberg News:
May 14 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.
“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”
Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”
Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year’s budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously.
The President went on to say:
“Most of what is driving us into debt is health care, so we have to drive down costs,”
Uh, whoa there Mr. President not so fast, while I’m sure health care, and credit card debt have played their part we can not ignore the role of massive government spending in creating our unsustainable debt load. Consider this: the gross domestic product of the United States was $14.2 trillion in 2008 and over past few months the Federal Government and Federal Reserve have spent, lent or commited 12.8 trillion.