http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/9/obamas-national-debt-rate-on-track-to-double/President Obama likes to say that raising the nation’s borrowing limit “won’t add a dime” to the federal debt, but he neglects to mention that the government already has borrowed the equivalent of more than 60 trillion dimes since he took office.When Mr. Obama became president in January 2009, the total federal debt stood at $10.6 trillion. This week, it hit $16.7 trillion — an increase of 57 percent. In the same time frame under President George W. Bush, total federal debt rose 38 percent. Under President Clinton, it rose 32 percent.
The administration says the government will run out of authority to pay its bills by Oct. 17 unless Congress raises the debt limit again to allow more borrowing. The president portrays the move as one of simple responsibility.
“It does not increase our debt,” Mr. Obama said. “It does not grow our deficits. All it does is allow the Treasury Department to pay for what Congress has already spent.”
The president rarely mentions that
he, by law, approves congressional spending, and his argument glosses over the nation’s burgeoning total debt.“It’s certainly not the whole story,” said Alex Brill, a budget specialist at the American Enterprise Institute.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the debt held by the public in the last four or five years, and it’s projected to only get worse.”
On Oct. 4, the debt held by the public — not including Social Security and Medicare —
had risen 89.3 percent since Mr. Obama took office, according to FactCheck.org, a nonprofit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The administration recently projected an annual deficit of $750 billion in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and $626 billion the year after that.
“At that rate, the debt owed to the public will more than double during the Obama presidency,” FactCheck said in its quarterly statistical report on Mr. Obama’s tenure in office.
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