Don’t look now, members of
the “supercommittee” battling the national debt, but the amount the U.S.
That’s a lot of George
Washingtons, as you can see here live at USdebtclock.org.
With a week until the
committee’s deadline to reach agreement on cutting $1.2 trillion to $1.5
trillion from the federal deficit over the next 10 years, the Joint Select
Committee on Deficit Reduction still has no agreement to stem automatic cuts to
the budget.
A Democrat on a special
deficit-cutting supercommittee Wednesday questioned whether
Republicans are still interested in negotiating after the panel’s top GOP
member said Republicans have “gone as far as we feel we can go” on tax hikes,
the Associated Press reported.
A sense of deep pessimism
has gripped the supercommittee, and judging from the limited public statement
by panel members, a debt bargain could be out of reach.
“We need to find out whether
our Republican colleagues want to continue to negotiate or whether they’ve
drawn a hard line in the sand,” said supercommittee member Chris Van Hollen, a
Democrat from Maryland
The deficit
has ballooned to nearly $48,000 for every man, woman and
child in the U.S. U.S.
The debt has expanded at an
alarming pace, from $7.5 trillion in 2004 and $5.6 trillion in 2000. At the
current rate, Debtclock.org reckons that the debt will top $23 trillion in
2015, though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the
estimate at $17.6 trillion.
Back in August after a
protracted fight, Congress voted to raised the national-debt ceiling by $2.7
trillion to $17 trillion, while requiring $2.7 trillion in deficit reduction by
2021.
Compared with other
developed nations, the U.S.
has a debt to GDP ratio of 85 percent, compared with Germany
at 74 percent and Japan
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