What does the federal deficit have to do with the Columbia shuttle tragedy?
Let me explain:
This year, one federal government expenditure totals more than any other except for defense and health and human services. It is the payment of interest on the national debt.
With the budget President Bush will submit Monday to Congress, next year looks like more of the same. Administration and congressional sources say that Bush's budget estimates a record deficit of $307 billion.
This deficit occurs when the government spends more money than it takes from the people through taxes and other revenues. To handle the deficit, the government for years has borrowed money by selling bonds to people.
How much does the government owe?
According to the National Debt Awareness Center (http://www.federalbudget.com), it owes $6.4 trillion! Since the government cannot obviously repay the debt at once, it pays interest on it. This year, the interest costs us over $300 billion, which, as noted above, puts it in third place for federal expenditures.
How much will the budget deficit cost us?
To find that out, we simply take the deficit and multiply it by the percentage of the debt we pay on interest, which is about five percent. Five percent of $307 billion is a little over $15 billion. Coincidentally, this figure represents the same amount of money the federal government will spend this year on NASA, which runs the shuttle program.
Would this money have avoided the tragedy of the shuttle exploding?
We will never know for sure. But Richard Blomberg, former chair of NASA's aerospace safety advisory panel, said that budget cuts prevented upgrades to the Columbia shuttle.
The choice is ours. We can either pay higher taxes now to balance the budget or we can pay a huge price later in ways we do not want to imagine.