New fears US debt overload is getting dangerous
Not everyone is shrugging off the dangers of $22 trillion in debt. Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley warns we’re ignoring a catastrophe in waiting.
“We’re on cruise control to an economic meltdown here,” he said on "Cavuto: Coast-to-Coast" Friday. “If we don’t start addressing it now, we’re in good times, when this economy goes down, when we enter a recession, I’m afraid we won’t be able to react.”
Finley is cautious about the push on the left from 2020 candidates pushing more spending in the face of dangerous deficits.
“The Chinese and our other debt holders aren’t going to show up at our doors any time soon and say ‘hey, pay up!’ but eventually we’re going to have to pay it back in a form of higher taxes, a lesser standard of living and less Government spending,” he said. “We need to react now, instead we’re doing the opposite.”
FOX Business's Neil Cavuto raised the question of how taxing the rich would pay for those programs. “Even if you were to go after the top 10 percent and 100 percent it wouldn’t be enough to keep our entitlements going.”
Finley acknowledged both parties are to blame, saying, “We are not going to control the growth of spending. We’ve proven that. We’ve got a Republican president, we had a Republican controlled congress and they took this deficit to $1 trillion dollars a year.”
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The U.S. has added more than $1 trillion in debt in the last 11 months, doubling from $11 trillion to $22 trillion over the last ten years. The Congressional Budget Office projects the U.S. is on track to add $12 trillion more to the national debt over the next decade. That amounts to roughly $3 billion added to the national debt each day.