March 12, 2007
Editor, Delaware State News
It is time to amend our national Constitution to require the president to submit and the Congress to enact a balanced budget every year.
We are currently pushing toward $8 trillion of national debt, 40 percent of which is owed to foreign entities.
Our government’s unfunded liabilities are above $50 trillion and growing. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security costs are projected to exceed total government income within 40 years, leaving zero funds for defense, courts, international relations, homeland security or any other national government functions.
Our government reflects our personal finances with a negative personal savings rate and unprecedented personal debt. Then again, maybe it is the other way around. Maybe we have adopted our government’s financial habits.
Either way, to get to this point took sustained poor financial practice by our national government, with our accession. We are facing some very hard decisions that will require some blunt honesty, courage and leadership from our Congress and our president. We also need partisan political bickering to end and civility to return to our discussion of issues.
To re-establish national financial discipline will require serious consideration and good will from all of us.
We are more divided and unwilling to participate in a common effort to address our nation’s problems than at any other time in my life and I fear for our country’s future.
Our founders expressed the effects of divisiveness with the words, “United we stand, divided we fall.” We are seriously divided, and we need to get together to put our house in order.
Steve McClain