In his 2008 campaign for president, candidate Obama said that the debt run up by President Bush was “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” and that Bush ran up the debt all “by his lonesome” (short video). Despite presiding over far more debt in his first term than Bush did in two, President Obama was re-elected by young folks. It would seem that debt doesn’t really register with millennials. Although millennials may not be interested in debt, debt is interested in them.
On Oct. 1, 2016 the federal government will begin its next fiscal year, FY 2017. Fiscal 2017 will mark ten years since the last budget produced by a Republican Congress before the Democrats took over Congress in Jan. 2007. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids, because a year from now we’ll start rolling over the Democrat debt.
The ten-year anniversary of fiscal 2007 is significant because most of the federal debt is in instruments that have terms of ten years or shorter. The deficit for fiscal 2007 was -$160B. When Nancy Pelosi took over, the deficit exploded: in fiscal 2008 the deficit hit -$458B, a record, and in fiscal 2009 the deficit hit -$1,412B, another record. And then came three more trillion-dollar deficits. So, fiscal 2017 should be the lull before the storm, and a quarter of it will have elapsed before the swearing in of the next Congress. Enjoy. – READ MORE
