During his campaign for re-election, don't expect Barack Obama to bring up the national debt. By the time Americans are voting, Obama will have added more than $5.5 trillion of red ink during his first term in office – an increase of more than 50% beyond the total debt accumulated by the previous 43 presidents in over 200 years.
Rather than alarmed by the debt, Obama's budget would put America on a glide path to accumulate an additional $10 trillion of debt over just the next decade, and that is undoubtedly a grossly underestimated prediction.
In addition to the amount of the debt – which now exceeds our nation's GDP – many analysts are increasingly concerned about who holds all that credit; specifically foreign governments have about a third of the total. A lot of Americans are generally aware that China is the largest foreign creditor with over a trillion dollars of US Treasury IOUs. But, China is far from alone.
The above chart, courtesy of the House Republican Study Committee, demonstrates the distribution of debt to other nations and notably many would fall in the same category as China as "less than friendly" to America's best interests.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member