With Inauguration Day just five weeks away, I am taking a look back at the nation’s debt level when the outgoing Administration first took office in 2001.
Total outstanding government debt, Inauguration Day, 20 January 2001: 5,706,174,969,873.86
Total outstanding government debt as of Thursday, 11 December 2008: 10,597,885,059,458.78
While President Obama appears to feel unhampered as his team puts together a trillion dollar stimulus package, the doubling of the nation’s debt in the last eight years is sure to rain down on the new Administration before the first term is over. This made me wonder which poet Obama will pick for his Inauguration Day. Somehow, the poetry of Robert Frost, who read The Gift Outright at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, seems worthy of review.
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
-Gregor
