National Debt Passes $16 Trillion

The United States of America is $16 trillion in debt. Yes, the national debt has just surpassed $16,000,000,000,000.

The news comes at a bad time for President Obama as he tries to rally America at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. The Democratic Party is trying to show that America is better off since Obama took office but the Republican party is arguing that the debt has continued to rise under Obama.

Now that the Treasury Department has confirmed that the gross debt of the United States is at $16.016 trillion, Republicans have a little extra fuel to fight Obama.

House Speaker John Boehner said:

“Today’s news is another sad reminder of President Obama’s broken promise to cut the deficit in half. Instead of working in a bipartisan way to fulfill his promise, the president went on a ‘stimulus’-fueled spending binge that stuck every American man, woman, and child with a $50,000 share of this $16 trillion national debt.”

The Hill reports that Republicans made the national debt the centerpiece of the Republican National Convention last week. Two debt clocks were set up in Tampa as Republicans argued that Mitt Romney would be able to reduce the national debt.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said:

“The nation is in desperate need of strong executive leadership to end the financial chaos, restore discipline to government, and lead us to an economic renaissance.”

Sen. Bob Corker, added:

“Today, the United States passed a new unfortunate threshold which should be a call to action for Washington to finally address the potentially debilitating challenges posed by our unsustainable deficits and debt, which is now over 100 percent of our nation’s gross domestic product.”

President Obama, Joe Biden, and several other Democrats will give speeches this week during the 2012 DNC. (You can watch it live here.) Do you think they’ll have an answer for the United State’s $16 trillion debt?