US Debt Hits Record $16 Trillion

The national debt passed the $16 trillion mark on Tuesday, just as the Democratic National Convention kicks off, Fox News reported.

The Treasury Department announced Tuesday that the debt is at $16.016 trillion, a new record.

Two-thirds of the debt is owed to the U.S. government, American investors and future retirees, through the Social Security Trust Fund and pension plans for civil service workers and military personnel, Fox News reported.

China holds less than eight percent of the money our government has borrowed over the years.

“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,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement, The Hill reported.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said the failure of Democrats to address the growing debt shows they have that "no basis on which to ask to be kept in their majority,” according to The Hill.

"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,” Sessions said.

At their convention last week in Tampa, Republicans posted a giant electronic board that steadily ticked off the debt accumulated every moment from the time they gaveled into session Monday afternoon until they ended the convention late Thursday.

The nation owed $10.6 trillion on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was sworn in, and has added another $5.4 trillion since – more than Bush piled up in eight years in office, Fox News reported.

President Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, criticized President George W. Bush for taking “out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents … so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back,” according to Fox News.