John Spratt: “reclaiming my time, I said earlier that one reason we do not have the sort of moral outrage in the country about the…”

“reclaiming my time, I said earlier that one reason we do not have the sort of moral outrage in the country about the deficit, that people are concerned about it but they do not quite feel and see it, this is the reason why. {time} 1845 Foreigners have been buying our debt in copious quantities, relieving us of, for now, the outlay that we would have to make, digging out of our own capital and our own savings, they are picking it up, for now. But what this means is that over time, debt means dependence, and we are incurring dependence to our debtors, and this has happened increasingly since the year 2000. In the year 2000, foreigners held 30 percent of our Federal debt. Today, at least at the end of the last fiscal year, that had risen by 50 percent, almost 50 percent, or 44 percent; almost half of our debt is held today by foreigners, and that is a matter of some concern. It has to be one of the reasons that we do not need to be running persistent, perennial, huge deficits.”