On the recordMarch 20, 2024
Madam President, I come to the floor this evening to talk about our national debt, and I will be introducing a resolution here in a moment. Our national debt, to put it in perspective, had never been much before the year 2000. Cumulatively, it was $5 trillion. That is a lot of zeroes behind a 5. That is a lot. But that is what it took from the beginning of the country--most of it did occur from the 1960s to 1980. That is when we started doing deficits, but it really started to get to where they became entrenched in standard operating procedure in the year 2000. We did put two wars on the credit card. In 2000 to 2008, we went up to $10 trillion--all of a sudden, a lot more zeroes, with an extra zero and a 1. From 2008 to 2016, we went from $10 trillion to $16 trillion. Now it gets to be a little more repetitive. I got here--elected--in 2018. By 2018, we are adding $1 trillion a year. Stick with me here. That is $16 trillion, 17, 18. So I get here as a Senator, alarmed by that when you come from a place like Indiana and you ran a business for 37 years, and if you even did anything close to that, I guarantee you your line of credit wasn't going to get renewed. Since then--and we had a pandemic in there--it has gotten to where we have put a burden on future generations that I never imagined. I didn't think we would see it in this short a period. Well, we did roughly put $4 trillion more on the books through the worst pandemic we ever had.…
Source
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