The Obama-GOP debt hits $19 trillion

Amidst the excitement over the Iowa caucuses, an important data point was lost in the news cycle — a data point that embodies the anger fueling the results we saw last night. According to the Treasury, our gross federal debt has hit $19 trillion.

Obama has accumulated more debt than every other president combined. The gross federal debt currently stands at $19 trillion, which is more than 106% of our GDP. That is an increase of almost $8.4 trillion since President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009. It wasn’t until the summer of 2006, two centuries into our founding, that we accumulated our first $8.4 trillion in debt. Eighty-seven percent of that increase is comprised of the public share of the debt, which now stands at $13.65 trillion.

What’s worse, Obama accumulated roughly $3 trillion in foreign-held debt over just five and a half years — from $3.071 trillion to roughly $6.1 trillion. Obama likes to talk about private companies outsourcing jobs to find a better business climate, but he fails to see how he is outsourcing our inter-generational debt to foreign countries. Furthermore, as the Heritage Foundation points out, “when people in other countries buy U.S. government Treasury bonds, they have less money left to spend on U.S. private-sector goods and services.” Perforce, they are investing in American decline and dependency instead of growing our economy. Communist China, for instance, already owns $1.26 trillion of that debt.

However, this is not just about President Obama. As we’ve noted before, Republicans led by Paul Ryan championed the $500 billion healthcare bill, busted the budget caps by $90 billion over two years, gave Obama a $1.7 trillion debt ceiling increase, passed a $65 billion highway bailout, and reauthorized every penny of the $65 billion+ Department of Education. This was all in the last quarter of 2015.

Last month, lost in the rancor of the presidential campaign, CBO announced that, due in large part to the GOP-passed legislation, the deficit for this fiscal year is expected to be $130 billion higher than originally projected.

The federal government is now projected to spend $51.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Is there any wonder why the voters just don’t believe the GOP establishment anymore? They already perceive that the party establishment doesn’t care about sovereignty and social issues. But over the past year the GOP establishment’s reputation as fiscal conservatives has been exposed as an artifice to ignore the other issues while continuing to grow government rather than cut it back.

According to the entrance polls from the Iowa caucuses, more voters name government spending as the top issue on their minds over any other. Among those voters, Ted Cruz did the best.

Anyone wondering why Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Chris Christie garnered less than 7% of the vote in Iowa combined, look at the latest budget numbers and you will find 19 trillion reasons.

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