Bill Nelson: “As a Nation, we are recklessly careening down the road toward bankruptcy. In the fiscal year that ends in a week…”

“As a Nation, we are recklessly careening down the road toward bankruptcy. In the fiscal year that ends in a week, September 30, we are going to be hemorrhaging in our budget to the tune of $500 billion. That is a half trillion dollars. In the new fiscal year that starts October 1, it is estimated we are going to be hemorrhaging to the tune of $600 billion, well over a half trillion dollars. Just to put it in perspective, in the decade of the 1980s, when we ran up so much of our national debt, the max in any one year in the late 1980s was a deficit of $280 billion. That means we were spending $280 billion more than we had coming in in revenue. Therefore, we had to go out and borrow it, and that added to the national debt. The next fiscal year starts in a few days. We are going to spend more than we have coming in tax revenue to the tune of $600 billion and we have to borrow it. Now, where do my colleagues think we borrow it from? We borrow it from folks like you and me, when we buy Treasury bills. We borrow it from institutional investors like pension funds. But it will shock people to know that a good bit of the debt that is being acquired, or debt that is being bought--or to put it in the vernacular of the street, the people who we are borrowing from are the Chinese and the Saudis.”