President Trump’s State of the Union address has now been appraised by the various partisans and commentators, and his supporters are claiming a big win. The polls look good and even some of the President’s critics are conceding that he…
P resident Trump’s State of the Union address has now been appraised by the various partisans and commentators, and his supporters are claiming a big win. The polls look good and even some of the President’s critics are conceding that he carried the night. If it wasn’t a knockout, they say, then President Trump at least scored a TKO.
And, truth be told, by the usual metric of “peace and prosperity” he had reason to brag. To preen, even.
Still…
There was one piece of the picture that was missing and striking by its absence. The President neglected even to mention the matter of deficits and debt.
This doesn’t quality as an understandable oversight, since the deficit is running at around a trillion dollars per year and that would be a hard thing to miss, even if you weren’t good at doing balance sheets. A trillion here, a trillion there… pretty soon you are talking real money. Which, incidentally, we don’t have. That’s why we “owe” it.
The debt is twenty-two trillion… and rising. We are fast approaching the point at which the amount we pay, annually, in interest on the debt will exceed what we budget for national defense. There is something troubling about that picture. Frightening, even, when you consider that the nation is, nominally, at peace. The economy is booming and there are more jobs than people to fill them.
