On the recordMarch 25, 2010
The fact is, about 47 cents out of every dollar that we spend this year we are going to borrow. From whom are we borrowing it? Half we are borrowing from the American taxpayer, but the other half we are floating to the same people who hold our debt today. So we are doing a couple of things that are very dangerous for us. We are increasing our dependency on financing with those who don't have the best interest in mind for us, and we are raising the level of the amount of money we borrow that we have to pay back in interest to where it is not going to be long that all the money we are borrowing is interest. Why is that important to the individual family? If you have a savings that has recovered somewhat from the lows of 2009--and I think the average savings has recovered about 60 percent of its losses, or 75 percent of the losses in this country--when we start inflating the value of that retirement, the value of that asset is going to decline in terms of real dollars. We are perilously close to getting into the same situation we got into in the late 1970s and the early 1980s where we had double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and double-digit interest rates.
