By Christina Kostopoulou
It’s over one trillion and rising quickly, but if you are looking for a more precise number you can always go to usdebtclock.org, where the U.S. government is literally keeping a running tally! But where the government keeps it’s own tally is called the Bureau of the Public Debt and is located in Parkesburg in the hills of West Virginia, just six hours from Washington. The issue of how high can the US debt go is perhaps one of the most important story that we talk about over the next several years. We’ve seen the number and is frightening. How much do the American people owe? Right now the U.S.A. owes 13.6 trillion dollars. That is the absolute limit and in fact the U.S.A. has reached it.
The people working at Parkesburg are figuring every day the national debt and right now they are trying to keep an accounts balance, checking every penny and waiting for Congress to raise that debt limit. The debt of 13.6 trillion dollars practically means that nearly 1.2 billion dollars a day goes to interest payments. Now the next question that any American wants to ask is “How much do I owe as a taxpayer? How much do I owe as a citizen?” 111,388 dollars! Two years of the interest on the national debt would have covered all expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan this year! The interest payments on the national debt are by most estimates the fourth largest expenditure as a government!!
The issue of whether Congress will increase the limit or not is perhaps of lesser important since the fact of the matter is that this money is the money of the American taxpayers. World financial markets watch that limit and ask if the U.S.A. can keep to it. Are you going to be able to pay back the money that the rest of the world is loaning you? And that’s one of the most important factors that makes the value of the dollar to go down. The U.S. government has said that is setting the limit at 13.6 trillion and is about to go above it, but if the Congress doesn’t pass a new debt “ceiling” then the U.S. will literally have no funds to work with.
The recent elections which marked an unprecedented loss of the Democratic party are a clear indication that the American people –as the home page of the US debt clock explains- are well informed about “this country’s dire financial situation.”
