According to the U.S. Debt Clock, the current national debt is $34.4 trillion, which is nine zeroes in length or the equivalent of stacking a billion dollars 34,000 times.
Not only is that an eye-popping figure, the federal government is currently adding $1 trillion every 100 days, according to a CNBC article published last week.
"The problem in the United States is the federal government and state governments spend too much money. We should spend less,” Grover Norquist, a longtime tax reform advocate in Washington, D.C., told American Family Radio last week.
Norquist is known for his group Americans for Tax Reform, formed in the 1980s, which has prodded Republican lawmakers for 40 years to take a “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” and promise to take fiscal responsibility seriously.
That demand for fiscal sanity has made Norquist an enemy of some Republicans, who are swimming in taxpayers' money, and Norquist is like a watchful and hated lifeguard.
"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government,” Norquist famously told NPR. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Meanwhile, there is a push underway on Capitol Hill for the House and Senate to establish a bipartisan commission that can study and recommend changes to stop the federal government’s runaway national debt.
One group pushing for that study is the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which says its budget experts regularly lobby Congress to enact policy reforms to improve the country’s economic conditions.
Norquist, now a 40-year veteran of D.C. politics, told show host Walker Wildmon a bipartisan fiscal commission is a waste of time and doomed to fail.
"Bipartisan means there have to be Democrats in the room,” Norquist said, “and there are no Democrats who want to cut spending.”
Democrats are famous for always wanting to raise taxes again and again, he said, so their answer to fixing the national debt will be to raise taxes on Americans instead of cutting spending in Congress.
Even using the word “fiscal” on Capitol Hill, he advised, gives away the political game.
"Fiscal is their way of saying tax increases are the moral equivalent of budget cuts," Norquist said.
