Note this title from an article in the SF Chronicle:  “National debt seen heading for crisis level.”  So someone has noticed?   Let me repeat what I said in National Review Online:  there will never be a health care benefit because the President and the Congressonal leadership have  spent all the money. True, even they can’t tell  you what they spent it on; certainly not on defense, or transportation infrastructure, or stockpiling vaccines in case of a terrorist attack using bioweapons, or even on their own top priority, which was health care.  But it’s gone.

The federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget, but that doesn’t mean there is no limit to what it can spend.  The limit is what it can borrow at low interest rates.  It is reaching that limit, and certainly will have reached it long before the planned implementation date of the “historic” health care benefit, which will turn out not to have been a “big bang” as the article says, but a dud.

Remember two things as you read the article.  First, the numbers which the article uses are the Administration’s own projections.  The actual situation will certainly be even worse than that.  Second, none of the projected deficits include the cost of the health care bill, which was supposedly “paid for”.

We will be producing more on the deficit throughout April.