Bush administration needs to gain control of deficit

If a person overdraws his or her account, he or she will be charged. If a student exceeds his or her limit on their credit card, he or she will be hit with charges and will watch his or her credit rating diminish. If a person borrows billions and billions of dollars and drives a country into the greatest debt in its history, the government will surely step in and restore fiscal responsibility, right?

It was reported this week that because of rising Social Security costs and the continued increase of costs resulting from war, the United States will be facing its largest budget deficit in history. As of Thursday at 4:20 p.m., the national debt was $7,623,773,382,285.24.

This breaks down to nearly $26,000 per person in the entire country. This should not be considered acceptable by any organization, and the Bush administration needs to find ways to keep this deficit from escalating.

Bush is now attempting to have the tax cuts he created last year become permanent, which would only further add to the deficit. According to The New York Times, President Bush promised to cut the budget in half by 2009, and officials from the White House insisted on Tuesday that he is still on pace to do so. However, there is no plan in place to lower the deficit, and there are no signs that it will slow down as long as we remain at war with Iraq.

This is an unacceptable policy for a country that prides itself on being one of the great economic powers of the world. How can the United States expect to place economic sanctions on other countries when it is buried in debt? The longer this situation drags on, the more it will begin to affect America’s standing among other nations in the world.

The United States should be expected to serve as a model for other countries. What kind of example does a country with such a large deficit send?

This does not mean that we should stop offering all the benefits that we do. Obviously when a country is such a major player in the global community, a lot of money must be spent. When a country has a population as large as America’s, domestic concerns such as Social Security will not be cheap. When we have soldiers at war, we want them to be as well-prepared as humanly possible.

But, there is no reason why the Bush administration should be running up such historic amounts of debt during its time in the White House. If something is not done in the near future to address this situation, we will not be the only ones paying for it. Let’s not saddle our children with debt too massive to climb out from.

The above editorial appeared in The Lantern, the Ohio State University student newspaper, and was made available through KRTcampus.