I Was Just Wondering, Why All the Secrecy?
by James Glaser
February 15, 2010

When bills are signed into law, many times there will be much fanfare in the Rose Garden of the White House. The President is surrounded with the men and women of Congress who passed the bill under the glare of television lights. Other bills are almost secret. Those are the bills nobody wants us to think about.

Here is how one bill signing was reported by ABC News. "Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12,394 Trillion to $14.3 Trillion."

Once again we see a bill signing for an unpopular or embarrassing bill on a Friday afternoon. That way the story can hopefully fade into the background over the weekend. With the current national debt 0f $12.3 trillion, each citizen owes about $40,000. That works out to $113,000 for each taxpayer.

So, President Obama is raising the national debt by $1.9 trillion dollars. Numbers like that are hard to comprehend, but here is an example of what 1.9 trillion really is.

In terms of time, 1.9 trillion seconds adds up to about 60,000 years. And 1.9 trillion hours ago—or almost 220 million years ago—dinosaurs were just beginning to dominate the Earth.

The real information we need to understand concerning what President Obama did in signing this bill is the fact that we are going to borrow that money, and we and our children and their children and so on will be paying interest on that money until such time as we pay it back.

The last time America was out of debt was in 1835, when Andrew Jackson was President. Other than that year, our nation has always been paying interest to the wealthy of this nation and others who loan us money. Last year we paid over $200 billion dollars in interest on our debt, and with this bill we know that we paid nothing on the principal.

With the amount of our debt rising along with our interest payment, it is no surprise that President Obama wanted to keep this Debt Increase Bill as secret as he could.




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