“In mid-May, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revised its previous estimate of the federal government’s 2013 deficit downward by 24 percent. The fiscal year (which ends on September 30) will feature red ink of merely $642 billion, down from the $1 trillion-plus of the previous four years, said the CBO. For many Democrats, this proved what they knew all along: The national debt is not a clear and present threat.”

“We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,” President Barack Obama declared in an ABC News interview in March. “In fact, for the next 10 years, it’s going to be in a sustainable place.” In the same month and venue, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner (Ohio) joined the president in a rare moment of agreement: “We do not have an immediate debt crisis,” Boehner claimed.

“This attitude is reminiscent of the yarn about a man jumping off the roof of a 10-story building and, around the third floor, saying, “Everything looks fine so far!” ”

“After years of bipartisan overspending, public debt today—that’s the money that the federal government owes to domestic and foreign investors—is almost 90 percent higher than at the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. It climbed by $1 trillion dollars between December 2011 and December 2012 alone to its current level of $12.03 trillion, according to the CBO in May. Public debt is now 75.1 percent of GDP, the highest level since 1950, and it is projected to reach 76.2 percent next year.”

Full column by Veronique de Rugy @ http://reason.com/archives/2013/07/16/yes-we-do-have-a-debt-problem