The National Debt - $1 million a minute

Tom Raum reports for the Associated Press:

Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day — or nearly $1 million a minute.

....The national debt — the total accumulation of annual budget deficits — is
up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it
will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January
2009.

That's $10,000,000,000,000.00, or one digit more than an odometer-style
"national debt clock" near New York's Times Square can handle. When the
privately owned automated clock was activated in 1989, the national debt was
$2.7 trillion.

It only gets worse.

Over the next 25 years, the number of Americans aged 65 and up is expected to almost double. The work population will shrink and more and more baby boomers will be drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits, putting new demands on the government's resources.

These guaranteed retirement and health benefit programs now make up the
largest component of federal spending. Defense is next. And moving up fast in
third place is interest on the national debt, which totaled $430 billion last
year.

Aggravating the debt picture: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which
the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $2.4 trillion
over the next decade

Despite vows in both parties to restrain federal spending, the national debt as a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product has grown from about 35 percent in 1975 to around 65 percent today. By historical standards, it's not proportionately as high as during World War II — when it briefly rose to 120 percent of GDP, but it's a big chunk of liability.

"The problem is going forward," said David Wyss, chief economist at
Standard and Poors, a major credit-rating agency."Our estimate is that the
national debt will hit 350 percent of the GDP by 2050 under unchanged policy.