It could shape up to be a ho ho horrible week for younger Americans. Here is a chart of America’s long-term debt projections that was released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this year. It shows an utterly unsustainable climb in debts that will deliver a crushing blow to the generations that will inherit it. That chart does not change based on your political perspective. It is just a mathematical reality that our current laws have the federal government spending way more money than it is collecting in taxes.
To fix this problem, Congress has three choices: reduce spending rates, raise taxes, or do a combination of both. Absent that, Congress is forcing future taxpayers to deal with it (read: mainly millennial and Gen Z).
So what does Congress have planned for this week?
- Likely passage of an unpaid for tax cut that could add $1 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.
- An attempt to violate their own limitations to increase spending by more than $200 billion over the next two years.
- An attempt to pass a $100 billion+ emergency funding bill without offsetting it with lower-priority spending cuts.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget – the decisions that Congress will make this week alone could add $4.1 trillion to the bill that our nation’s leaders are putting on younger Americans. That is $4.1 trillion in resources that our leaders are making available to themselves to boost their political careers that will be unavailable for future generations.
While Congress will try to pretend to be Santa delivering presents to the American people through new spending sprees and tax cuts, they are more akin to the Grinch stealing opportunities from millions of their kids and grandkids’ futures.
We don’t need a trip with the ghost of Christmas future to know that the members of Congress are leaving future generations – Scrooge’d.