The President and many members of Congress want to keep borrowing money and don’t seem to care about whether their expenditures are essential or non-essential, nor do they seem to care about the very real and perilous ramifications of overspending.

From 2012–2022, interest payments on debt held by the public totaled $3,593 billion; interest payments on intragovernmental debt holdings totaled $1,919 billion. The grand total in interest payments amounted to a hefty $5,512 billion.

Who is benefitting from owning our debt?

The top foreign owners of U.S.  National Debt are Japan, China, UK, Belgium and Luxembourg.  Other holders of our debt include state and local governments, pension funds, insurance companies, U.S.  banks, mutual funds, and savings bonds investors.  Intragovernmental debt is held by various agencies and entities within the U.S.  government.

In addition to wasting money on interest payments, Congress has been lax about government waste and fraud, and their spending on non-essential projects during a time when we should be belt-tightening is inexplicable.  Fortunately, all this waste hasn’t gotten by Senator Rand Paul, who has been tracking all the wasteful spending and reports on it annually.  Every citizen should read his annual Festivus report at the following link.

In the report, Senator Paul details a whopping $482,276,543,907 of waste in 2022.

How do you think the over half a million homeless Americans would feel about our spending $2,100,000 to encourage Ethiopians to wear shoes (NIH)? $50,000,000 to boost the Tunisia travel sector during COVID-19 (USAID)? $1,700,000,000 to maintain 77,000 empty Federal buildings (GSA)? Or, how about the $17,000,000 spent on unused hotel rooms for illegal immigrants (DHS) and the $168,000,000 spent to help illegal immigrants avoid deportation (DHS)?

I’m not homeless, but it makes me furious!

What do you think the millions of food-insecure would think about our spending $210,069,000 on basic education projects in Jordan (USAID); $3,000,000 to construct a Gandhi museum, or $1,100,000 for training mice to binge drink alcohol (NIH)?

How do you feel about the billions wasted that could have been used in your community to replace a dangerous bridge, build roads, clean up your water supply (thinking of you, Flint, MI), and so on?

Are our representatives inept or stupid, or do they have nefarious motives? I can’t decide, but it’s time to take away the Congressional credit card until they can be held accountable and stop wasting tax money.

Personally, I don’t mind paying taxes to live in our country, but I just don’t like how my tax dollars are squandered.  I worked too hard to have it thrown it away.

If we are of a similar mindset, then please, contact your representatives in Congress today and tell them to start paying down our debt and live within our means. Accruing all this debt is dangerous to our survival and unjustifiable.

Graphic credit: BlueTailLizard