
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 16, 1990                   TAG: 9004160223
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TIME TO PAY

BY NOW, you know or should know - whether enough was withheld from your 1989 paychecks to cover your federal income-tax liability or whether you had to send a check with your tax return. But either way, chances are Uncle Sam socked you for a few thousand dollars in taxes. What you may not realize is how much of it is being used to pay interest on the $3.1 trillion national debt.

Nowadays, the federal government devotes a tidy $175 billion or so a year to paying that interest. Divide that by about 250 million Americans - the approximate number the Census Bureau expects to count this year - and every man, woman and child of us is paying $700 annually just to service the national debt. If you're the family's sole wage-earner, with spouse and two children, you paid $2,800 for that alone.

A lot of money. And none of it goes to reduce that debt: The $700 per American goes only for the interest.

"I've heard people describe it as the ultimate example of wasteful spending," says Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. "You don't get a program, you don't get education, you don't get a bomber, you don't get anything, really. You're just spending the money."

Of course, some other Americans, or institutions that have bought U.S. securities such as bonds or Treasury notes, get much of the money the rest of us spend in this way. But there seems little point in citizens passing cash through the government's hands so that some can make a profit from it. If we must give money to Uncle Sam - and most of us must - why not use it to buy something?

What a lot that $175 billion could buy. The independent reporting service Congressional Quarterly says that this year's interest payment on the debt would buy any one of these: housing assistance for 32 million families; Pell grants for 76.5 million needy college students; 25 years' worth of nutrition programs; four years and three months' worth of federal Medicaid payments; six to eight manned space stations; 586 B-2 "Stealth" bombers; 22 superconducting supercolliders; or 146 Trident submarines.

Indeed, interest is one of the biggest and fastest-growing items in the federal budget. It is now the third largest, behind defense and Social Security. In 1980 it ranked fourth, at a mere $52.5 billion. But in the mid-1980s it overtook the large array of income-security programs loosely labeled welfare: e.g., food stamps, subsidized housing, aid to families with dependent children.

The bill for interest is bigger now than even the annual deficits. It will grow because the massive deficits continue. And it buys us nothing. David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's first budget director, has written: "By turning ourselves into a debtor nation for the first time since World War I, we have sacrificed future living standards in order to service the debts we have already incurred." We still have the morning-after headache from our 1980s binge. But we can't bring ourselves to take the medicine to make it go away.

by CNB