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Both parties helped run up US $14 trillion debt
(Associated Press) -- by TOM RAUM --
Two centuries after America's birth, the national debt was a bit under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Just three decades later, it has soared above $14 trillion, and accusations of blame are flying. Both Republicans and Democrats played major roles in driving the figure sky high.
If the tab were divided up now, it would come to roughly $47,000 for each man, woman and child in the United States.
In what is shaping up as the next bruising economic battle, Congress is being asked by President Barack Obama to authorize fresh borrowing once the nation's fast-growing debt slams into the current debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion — something the Treasury Department says will happen no later than May 16.
Leaders of both parties acknowledge that failing to raise the limit could force the government to begin defaulting on some of its obligations — for instance making interest payments on Treasury bills and bonds — with severe adverse consequences, including possibly pushing the economy back into recession.
Creative accounting may help forestall the crisis for a few additional months. But then the effects could be severe, or as the White House warns, "like Armageddon, in terms of the economy."
Republicans like to blame Obama and congressional Democrats, citing heavy spending that they claim has done little to end the recession or create jobs. Democrats argue that the stage for fiscal ruin was set by Republican President George W. Bush, with large tax cuts that favored the wealthy, two wars and a vastly underfunded prescription drug program for the elderly. They accuse Bush of squandering a budget surplus handed him by President Bill Clinton.
"We lost our way" during the Bush years, Obama suggested on Wednesday as he laid out his own prescriptions for taming the nation's long-term budget woes, a move the administration hoped would also smooth the way for a debt-ceiling vote.
In fact, spending far outpaced revenues in both the Bush and Obama years. And the main culprit in addition to war spending was the devastating 2007-2009 recession, which not only prompted hundreds of billions of dollars in downturn-fighting spending by both the Bush and Obama administrations, but also resulted in a sharp dip in tax revenues due to sagging individual and corporate incomes.
The main reasons for big increases in the national debt in the years ahead are fast-growing obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs as tens of millions of baby boomers reach retirement age.
Congress has raised the debt limit ten times in the last decade alone, most recently in February 2010...MORE...LINK
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