On the recordFebruary 17, 2011
In an effort to help my constituents understand, the country understand, and even almost understand the scale of the problem we face, it's important I think to think of the expenses, the obligations of the Federal Government in terms of our own budget, that if we in our own lives take our income, you've got to calculate your income and your expenses. And the things you have got to pay first are the mortgage; you have got to pay the light bill. You have to make sure that, above all, the expenses of your home are paid first. And in the same way, the Federal Government must pay the expenses of the mandatory programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the interest on the national debt, our obligation to our veterans. Those programs must be paid first. We bring in about $2.2 trillion in revenue every year from all sources. When you take into account what the Federal Government must pay to our veterans, to the mandatory spending programs, those programs cost about $2.3 trillion. Therefore, the way to think about the scale of the problem we face is to analyze it in terms of, when do we, as a Nation, run out of cash and have to start borrowing? When is national credit card day? And in analyzing that, I discovered that we actually don't have a national credit card day. At the stroke of midnight on the first day of the fiscal year, the United States Government has already borrowed $105 million.
