This Sunday is Debt Day. It’s not a day to celebrate, but it is one every American should observe.
Debt Day is the day – just about halfway through the fiscal year – when the government runs out of cash on hand and starts living on credit.
According to a memo released by House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner and the House Republican Joint Economic Committee staff, “Debt Day is an illustration of the size of government spending relative to the revenue the government receives and is calculated by taking the ratio of the federal revenues to the federal outlays projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and applying it to the 365 days of the fiscal year.”
Debt Day is defined to be the day of the fiscal year in which total government spending exceeds total federal revenues. The earlier Debt Day falls in the year means the more deficit spending the government will incur.
Last year Debt Day fell on August 5th, but this year it comes almost four months earlier. This early date means that previous debt level records are about to be broken, and not just broken, but shattered. The same memo noted that a huge contributing factor to an earlier Debt Day is “the Democrat trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ spending bill, the more than $400 billion ‘omnibus’ spending bill loaded with some 9,000 unscrutinized earmarks, and another $350 billion in bailout funds Democrats have green-lighted since the beginning of the year.”
In an op-ed by Boehner he calls this Sunday “a symbol of generational theft,” and that it is absurd to think “that we can borrow and spend our way back to prosperity.”
The Obama stimulus is making our country’s deficit bigger, as the earliest Debt Day in history indicates. Plus, all the borrowing and taxing has not put us on the path to recovery like he first promised it would.
Debt Day is nothing to celebrate, but hopefully it will show Americans the wasteful spending of their money that both administrations have undertaken and will be, what Boehner calls, “A Symbol of Washington’s Arrogant Culture of Borrowing and Spending.”
