Debt Bomb: The US Suicide Vest

Terrorism threatens the United States more than it has in years, but the nation’s $18.6 trillion gross national debt looms as a kind of silent killer, jeopardizing the country’s national security and global superpower status.

The debt today stands at $18.6 trillion. That means every U.S. citizen — man, woman and child — owes $57,854. Can society survive under such a burden?

Things will only worsen. The debt is on pace to double from $10.6 trillion in 2009 to roughly $20 trillion by the time Obama leaves office in early 2017.

The government will spend approximately $227 billion in 2015 on debt servicing, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. This figure is higher than the combined total spent on unemployment benefits, food stamps, higher education and pollution control.

As the Federal Reserve begins raising interest rates back to normal, debt-service payments will more than triple to $722 billion by 2024. The total military budget for 2015 is $600 billion.

Skyrocketing interest payments are taking an ever larger chunk of the federal budget and gobbling up funds that should be put toward essentials like defense and infrastructure spending, while liberals will continue to demand increased spending on welfare.

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Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has called the debt “an unsustainable situation that we have got to come to grips with sooner rather than later.”

A former military chief is similarly grim.

“We just can’t be the country that we’re capable of … if we keep spending ourselves into oblivion,” former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mike Mullen said last year.

Meantime, the landscape of global geopolitics is experiencing its largest realignment since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. As other countries like Russia, China — even the group known as the Islamic State — become more emboldened to flex their military muscle, the largest stumbling block to U.S. leadership in the world is right under its nose.

Greenspan noted in June that the U.S. was “way underestimating” the size of its national debt.

The estimates, Greenspan said, fail to take into account future events, such as another bank bailout, that will require government intervention. Others have asserted the true debt is three times the size of the economy when taking into account unfunded liabilities.

The issue divides even Republicans. Some of the GOP presidential candidates, like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, express alarm and call for reigning in entitlement spending. Others, like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, say entitlements are a guarantee that cannot be changed. A few seem to pay little attention to the politically charged issue at all.

The problem can be attributed to a failure of leadership at the top.

The problem can be attributed to a failure of leadership at the top. Conservatives have warned about the debt for years and have tried to address the issue, holding debt-ceiling increases hostage during the Obama years as a means of extracting concessions on spending.

Obviously, the debt must be repaid at some point. For repayment to happen, austerity programs — tax hikes and spending cuts — will be required to free up funds. As any observer of the situation in Greece can attest, this is a painful process that creates internal strife, throttles the economy and hamstrings the government’s ability to address its priorities.

A 2013 report by RAND Corp. notes a Catch 22 — we are in economic jeopardy if we run a debt, and imperiled if we try to pay it off.

“A persistently high level of government debt threatens future economic growth and constrains the ability of the government to act in pursuit of national interests, both international and domestic,” the authors stated. “Yet efforts to bring down the debt will further constrain government outlays and action — possibly for many years into the future.”

Some have pointed to economic growth as the key to debt reduction, but this has averaged less than 2 percent annually under Obama, casting aside fantasies that we will be able to “grow ourselves out” of debt.

ISIS may be hoarding the headlines, and it threatens our future. But a less tangible, though no less real, terror lurks within the nation’s ledgers.