The 2011 fiscal year ended Sunday night and the new debt numbers are in. You might want to sit down before you read more. And send your kids out of the room. If they get a good look at the hole we’ve dug for them, they’re going to get very upset.

According to the U.S. Treasury, the debt of the U.S. government climbed by a total of $1,275,901,078,828.74 in fiscal 2012, which ended yesterday.

That means the federal government borrowed approximately an additional $10,855 for each household in the United States just over the past twelve months.

The total debt of the United States now equals approximately $136,690 per household.

The good news — if there is any good news about a $16 trillion debt — is 2012 didn’t raise the debt quite as much as 2009 or 2010, though it was more than 2011. Your share of the debt is now $10,855 more than it was at the same time last year and there’s no indication right now that the number will drop, at least not for the foreseeable future. Fiscal 2012′s deficit is the fifth straight year we’ve added more than a trillion dollars to the debt.

Here are the year-by-year numbers.

Fiscal 2007: $500,679,473,047.25

Fiscal 2008: $1,017,071,524,650.01

Fiscal 2009: $1,885,104,106,599.26

Fiscal 2010: $1,651,794,027,380.04

Fiscal 2011: $1,228,717,297,665.36

Fiscal 2012: $1,275,901,078,828.74

Remember, we’re still on the edge of the 2008 recession we never quite left. I don’t think another few years of trillion-dollar deficits is going to get our economic engine purring, do you?

The cost of President Obama’s ever-growing big government policies has cost us far more than we can reckon now. There are, quite literally, dozens of economic figures we could quote to support that contention: the trajectory of our national debt, the flaccid GDP growth numbers, the major unemployment indicators, the housing market, consumer debt, and college loan debt are good categories to explore if you want to paint the mural of failure to represent the past four years. One recent statistic, however, tells the story of how fall our nation has fallen and how much work we will all have to do to bring it back to where it once was. A recent Pew poll asked Americans into which economic class they thought they fit. Their answers were more dismal than even the most jaded pessimist would expect.

A Pew Research survey found Americans who saw themselves as being a part of the “lower classes” has increased from 25 percent to 32 percent during President Barack Obama’s tenure. Even worse, those who describe themselves as “lower class” are losing hope, which is consistent with the 368,000 workers who gave up looking for work in August and left the workforce.

Seventy-seven percent said it was harder to get ahead than it was ten years ago and only 51% said hard work brings success. More people in the lower classes said they thought their children would have it worse in the next generation.

Think about what that means. Almost a third of America believes it is at the very bottom of our economy and, worse, these Americans believe they don’t have much chance of climbing up. Hope? Fading fast. Change? Decidedly for the worse.

The Census Bureau reported last month that one out of six Americans is under the poverty line, a new record. More families live in poverty now than ever before and the number of poor women in our country hit a 17-year high. These are the people left behind while our government has spent them into lives of desperate dependence. These are the Americans who believed that our government existed to give them all they could want only to learn that, to put it bluntly, their elected officials have lied to them. These Americans need help now, help that only a vibrant economy, responsible government, and renewed optimism can give them.

We know how to turn our economy around. We know what it takes. We know that gargantuan government filled with Budget Bandits won’t get the job done. It’s time we found some people who remember their job isn’t to pump hope and change into us like we’re hot air balloons but to give us a government that protects our rights and gives us room to find our own happiness.

The chart in this post ought to scare the bejeezus out of you. It shows how much our government has spent per-capita in inflation-adjusted dollars in every year going back to 1977. You won’t be surprised to see that number had trended upwards and that it’s biggest increase, by far, has come in the past four years.

What might surprise you is that Republican administrations have not exactly held the line on spending. The Reagan and Bush 41 years saw overall spending increases while the Clinton administration’s numbers were generally lower than the administration before it. Spending exploded once under Bush 43 and again under Obama.

You can probably make the point that President’s don’t bear much responsibility for government spending — the Constitution gives that duty to Congress — but you can’t take the White House completely off the hook. The President submits the budget that Congress then tweaks and alters. Once a budget is passed (let me note here the Senate has not approved a budget for over three years), the President does have the power to veto it if it’s too large and spends too much. I can’t recall the last time a President rejected a budget that way. For that matter, I can’t recall the last time since Ronald Reagan a President pushed hard in public for a budget smaller than the one Congress wanted to pass.

The President is the Chief Executive and that matters when it comes time to spend the money. We won’t solve our fiscal problems without help from the Oval Office. It’s time we got a President who took the budget seriously.

Sean Hackbarth, at the Free Enterprise Blog, wrote an interesting post about one sector of the economy that has boomed over the past few years. No, I’m not talking about the Democratic Campaign Contributors who Also Happen to Invest Heavily in Solar Energy Companies sector. I mean, the smartphone app industry.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 45% of American adults now have a smartphone. These gadgets along with tablet computers have sprouted a new industry, the “App Economy,” where entrepreneurs develop and market productivity and entertainment programs used on mobile devices.

This industry has shot off the starting line faster than Usain Bolt. According to a study by economist Michael Mandel for the trade association, TechNet, 466,000 jobs have been created by the App Economy.

Here’s the thing about the smartphone app industry; it is largely untouched by government regulation. As Ray Ramsey, CEO and President of TechNet said, “If you have a computer, broadband connection, and the right skills and software, and you can start coding.” Right now, no government agency has to grant you an App Authorship Permit to write a new bit of coolness for the iPhone. You don’t need to spend 4 or 5 million dollars on an environmental impact survey before you launch Awesome App Industries. If you have the skill and a good idea, you can make your own app and put it on the market.

Entrepreneurs have noticed the low barriers to entry and massive demand and filled a need. As a result, a nationwide market that did not exist five years ago has created roughly 7,800 jobs a month. Over three-quarters of those jobs are small business jobs, which means that less regulation and lower taxes will make it easier for people to jump in, create their own apps, and build business that hire even more people.

But here’s another interesting thought. President Obama has been quite vocal about his desire to spend billions of dollars on community colleges. Here is what he wants from his new initiative, taken from the White House web site.

Community colleges work with businesses, industry and government to create tailored training programs to meet economic needs like nursing, health information technology, advanced manufacturing, and green jobs.

Last July, President Obama proposed the American Graduation Initiative to invest in community colleges and help American workers get the skills and credentials they need to succeed. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act includes $2 billion over four years for community college and career training. [Emphasis mine]

There is no doubt those fields need skilled workers, with the exception of the “green jobs” field that has been a complete bust despite the President’s best efforts to proper it up with hundreds of millions of our dollars. Wouldn’t it be better, though, to let prospective students decide what “economic needs” the colleges will help meet through their own choices?

Let me quote one more bit of Hackbarth’s piece.

Peter Farago of Flurry, a company that works with app companies, told the subcommittee that the lack of skilled workers is also a concern for the industry. He surveyed Flurry customers and found that 71% of them need more employees with technical training and only 24% of them could find enough skilled software developers.

Community Colleges are almost perfectly positioned to give that sort of training, if they are left alone to respond to the demands of the educational market. Most junior colleges offer everything from certificate programs all the way up to full-blown two-year degree programs geared toward transfer to a four-year college and every one of those programs work well for technical fields. Better, would-be app authors can take the classes they need à la carte to get the skills they need to enter the field on their own. If our government would stop “encouraging” needs the public doesn’t necessarily want, like “green jobs”, and let local colleges and entrepreneurs work out their arrangements the way they should in a free market economy, there is no limit to how quickly our economy could grow.

You don’t need an app to tell you that.

Well, we did it. It took a lot of work and the effort of tens of thousands of bureaucrats all pushing in the same direction, but we reached a milestone of failure so colossal that it can barely be imagined. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d get here quite so soon, what with all those earnest Republicans talking about how we need a smaller, more responsible government but darned if most of them didn’t lean into the task with all the vigor of a big-government Democrat. So here we are, standing on a pinnacle from which we can survey the entire world.

Today, at about 4 PM Central Time, our national debt hit the $16 trillion dollar mark. And we didn’t even stop for a sip of champagne.

We hit this mark despite the first-ever downgrade of our national credit rating, a contentious debt ceiling debate, unemployment over 8% for the longest period in history not called The Great Depression, credit crises all over Europe, no actual budget for three years, and a spontaneously-formed grassroots movement of millions of Americans all shouting “STOP”. The obligation our debt puts on each of us is the heaviest in the world.

[Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala] noted that the U.S. has more debt-per-citizen than Portugal, Italy, Spain, or Greece — four of the so-called PIIGS of the European Union (Ireland is the fifth) who have defaulted or risk defaulting on their debt.

In other words, we’re on the edge of a precipice and the ground is mighty slippery.

One note here. I mentioned the debt ceiling debate earlier in the post. The outcome of that little exercise in bureaucratic “I’ll wash your back if you wash mine” camraderie was that the debt limit actually increased to just a shade under $16.4 trillion dollars, so we’re not very far from another debt ceiling debate during which I’m sure our leaders in Washington will get even more use out of their loofah sponges. Meanwhile, your share of the debt right now as a citizen stands at almost $51,000. If you pay taxes (and almost half of America does not), you owe about $140,000.

In other words, if you’re a taxpayer, you owe more than the median value of a house in 13 out of 50 states. That number is only going up and it will continue to go up until we do something to stop it.

Are you ready to stop it? Your chance is coming in November. You will have the opportunity to put people in Washington who will take our debt seriously and cut our government down to a more reasonable size. To be sure, the plans on the table are a long way from where they need to be, but the beauty of our political system is that we the people wield the power. There is nothing a politician wants more than job security and if we vote out a few big-spenders and put a few responsible government types in their places, the message will start to sink in. First, check out our free e-book. Then send the message that needs to be sent.

Sixteen trillion dollars is a milestone we should never have reached. Let us make sure we don’t hit $17 trillion.

We folks who want Congress to run our government responsibly often point to the federal deficit as a chief sign that it is not. There’s a good reason for that — a $16 trillion debt is neither responsible nor fair to those who will have to pay it off one day. However, there is another debt that has run mostly under our radar, a debt built by state governments who has too often clamored to keep up with federal demands for more freebies for more people. Joel Gehrke reports:

California isn’t the only state with a debt problem: States and local governments have over $3.7 trillion in debt, according to a new report from the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

“State and local governments have outstanding debt of more than $3.7 trillion dollars in municipal bonds, and hundreds of millions of dollars in new municipal bonds are issued each year,” TIGTA announced today.

The states owe that money to real people who bought those bonds with the belief that our governments were good for it. Whether that belief was well-founded is still an open question. States have looked for a way to legally declare bankruptcy since at least 2011 as their books have filled with more and more red ink. I don’t doubt that any state would duck at least part of its obligation if it could legally do so. State legislators could then blame all the budget cuts and ridiculous tax increases that would follow on the bankruptcy instead of their own selfishness and laziness.

I can’t entirely blame the states, though. Their ability to raise revenue through reasonable levels of taxation has been hampered by Washington’s relentless encroachment into our paychecks. We will only accept a certain percentage of total taxation before we start looking for pitchforks, torches, and the address to the nearest State House and every federal tax increase takes up tolerance space the states (and municipalities, which have their own fiscal problems) can not use. When states can’t adjust their tax rates, they don’t have many other options. They can sell bonds or they can beg Washington for more and more money they should rightly have collected themselves. We’ve seen both happen quite a lot in recent years and we’re likely to see much more before we straighten things out.

That, of course, assumes we send people to Washington who will straighten things out. That, also, is an open question. But it’s a question we can answer ourselves. In November, we will all decide whether we want people who will make government smaller or whether we’ll continue to walk blissfully toward the fiscal comeuppance that isn’t all that far away. The debt continues to rise. Medicare is a decade away from collapse. Social Security isn’t that far behind. When they fall, they’ll take the rest of all the nifty “safety net” programs with them — food stamps, S-CHIP, housing assistance, you name it. The math doesn’t lie, though many politicians in Washington do.

Let’s just fix the problems now — in DC and our states - so they don’t become unsolvable later.

I’ve never had an intern. To be honest, I could probably use one, what with all the writing, podcasting, more writing, and working social media like Leopold Stokowski in front of a symphony orchestra, but there are rules to getting an intern. You have to be able to give them valuable educational experience and a worthwhile recommendation and while I’m a pretty fair teacher, I’m not sure a college graduate is going to prize a reference from “the one-man content machine and social media ninja” (assuming I call myself that, which I really don’t).

Despite my lack of an intern, I do know that businesses like interns because they are sources of cheap labor. On the other hand, young people trade earnings for learning, contacts, and mentors that pay off handsomely later on in their careers. The system works so long as interns are cheap and businesses pay out in intangibles. When one side gets out of balance, you end up with a huge mess like this one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

“OCIO [Office of the CIO] funded an intern program for a total of $2 million which, while funded as a security enhancement project, only resulted in one intern being hired full-time for ASOC [the Agriculture Security Operations Center]… This project is intended to develop and sustain a highly skilled IT security and computer technology workforce. Expenditures for FY 2010 and 2011 included over $686,000 for development and implementation of a networking website and approximately $192,500 in housing costs for two summers. While the intern program may be a beneficial step in the long-run, it did little to further the more pressing objective of improving USDA’s IT security.”

I have questions, and I bet you do, too.

1. Where did all the money go?
2. Why does a Federal government program need interns in the first place?
3. What housing costs run almost $100,000 a year? If you put a person up in a hotel room for a whole year at $200 a night, you wouldn’t run a $100,000 bill.
4. What kind of awesome website do you get for almost $350K a year? Is it the most awesome website in the history of the internet?
5. Seriously. Where did all the money go?

When we responsible government types talk about the casual waste inherent in big government, this is what we’re talking about. Two million dollars isn’t a lot, weighed against the rest of the $3.8 trillion yearly budget but if you consider there are tens of thousands of government programs, each of which could easily waste a million or two a year, and you can see how easily our money gets frittered away.

Let’s say you were in charge of a conference and you wanted a couple of videos made, to help liven up the mood. You know the kind of video I’m talking about — a goofy little spoof of some popular movie or television show full of inside jokes that will make the attendees feel welcome and get a little bit loose. You might drop a few hundred bucks on each one, maybe a couple or three thousand of you had a big budget and were feeling generous. But would you feel generous enough to spend $5,000 a video? How about $10,000?

How about $26,000?

Expenditures at two conferences held in Orlando last year for Human Resources employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs totaled up to $9 million, according to an investigation by the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Among these expenditures were $84,000 for branded promotional items, such as pens, $3,000 for two event photographers, and a whopping $52,000 to produce a pair of eight-minute videos spoofing the film “Patton” that were shown at the conferences. The videos, provided by the committee, are below.

Folks, I’ll be straight with you. These days, if you spend more than $10,000 for any conference video (or, for that matter, any political ad released on the internet), you should be fired for rank incompetence. I could name four people right now who would have made both those videos for a third of what the Department of Veteran Affairs paid for just one. Of course, government employees aren’t held accountable for how much of our money they toss down a rat-hole, so they had no impetus to find quality creators at a lower cost. In fact, they couldn’t find enough motivation to keep their spending within the extravagant budget they were given.

[A]ccording to a letter sent by committee chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) and ranking member Bob Filner (R-Calif.) to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki this week, this profligate spending may be the tip of the iceberg.

The congressmen cite committee testimony from VA Chief Financial Officer W. Todd Grams last year indicating that conference spending for Fiscal 2011 topped $100 million, despite a rough $20 million having been budgeted for such events.

Let that sink in for a minute. They had $20 million dollars to spend on conferences in one year, which means they could have held a conference every month and spent $1,666,666.67 on each one. The Department of Veterans Affairs is large — it had nearly 280,000 employees in 2008 and the federal government has only grown since then — but not so large, I think, that it would require an expensive conference every month. Despite that lavish budget, though, the agency felt it needed more. Five times more.

One hundred million dollars worth of conferences, or more than $8.3 million dollars every month.

That, folks, is so far past appropriate that it’s not in the same time zone. It’s not even on the same continent. Our bureaucrats in Washington, the people who work for us and who live off the money they take our of our hands whether we like it or not, are out of control.

We have a chance to retake control of our government in November. To be sure, it will take more than one election to carve government down to an appropriate and responsible size, but we have to start now. Insist that your candidate go to Washington not with a scalpel but with a sledgehammer. Demand they devote their time to smashing the byzantine arrangements that allow unaccountable government employees to squander your money without consequence (do you think anyone will be fired as a result of this story?) so that when they’re done, they leave Washington smaller and simpler for the person who follows them. Then insist the next person to the same. And the person after that. In time, hopefully in less time than we think, we will have a government that does what we need it to do instead of a government that exists to buy votes for the people who run it and coddles the fat and happy bureaucrats who think $26,000 for a goofball video is an appropriate use of our children’s’ money.

Sometimes the phrase “government pork” is a euphemism and sometimes it’s not.

President Obama announced today that the Agriculture Department will spend $170 million to buy meat ($100 million for pork, $50 million for chicken, and $10 million worth of yummy lamb) and $10 million for catfish, freeze the stuff for a while, and distribute it to food banks.

If this seems to you like a transparent ploy to buy votes, you’re probably right. Food prices are on the rise and the economy is still stagnant, which means one of two things. First, food banks around the country are short food, mostly because demand has increased but also people people have less “spare” money to donate to them. Second, due to a serious drought and years of government ethanol meddling, farmers aren’t getting as much for their livestock as they would because the cattle, sheep, and other animals they sell as food aren’t as big as they would otherwise be. In addition, farmers are selling their livestock now because they either can’t get enough food to keep what they have or they can’t afford the high cost of feed.

The administration’s food-buying program will help those groups, at least in the short term, assuming the government agencies in charge of them don’t botch them badly (a possibility we can never discount). On the other hand, it will hurt the rest of us because it will drive the cost of beef, chicken, lamb, etc. even higher than it would otherwise be and those prices are likely to stay high for longer than usual. Why? Think back to the price of used cars after the Cash for Clunkers program took cars off the market in one fell swoop that would have come off the market naturally over a couple years. The year after the program, used car prices soared and though we can’t blame that rise on the program alone, it was a large factor. We can expect the same thing to happen with the cost of meat.

At least this time, they’re putting the pork right out in the open where we can see it. Maybe we should count that as progress.

One of the central arguments against big government is that a few of us is not smarter than all of us. That is, a relatively small number of bureaucrats in Washington can not make decisions for us, can not manage our economy, can not create jobs, can not ensure our welfare and happiness as well as each of us acting in our own best interests. The crowd really does have wisdom, even if individuals are not particularly wise.

For example, take a look at the trillion-dollar Stimulus Bill, which was supposed to create jobs by the truckload, build miles upon miles of roads and bridges, and cure all manner of societal ills through the application of taxpayer dollars and bureaucratic faery dust. We don’t even need to look at the entire bill, but a small part called the Rural Utilities Service, which sent tens of millions of dollars to small towns so they could create almost 3,400 jobs. The Heritage Foundation reported on the program’s progress thus far and found less than stellar results.

Some of the recipients have not used their stimulus awards to create a single job. The Wholesale Water Commission of Atchison County, Missouri, for instance, received a $22 million stimulus award, but has yet to even begin construction on the project for which the money was earmarked. Result: no jobs created.

The cities of Elkins, WV; Thomasville, AL; Ruidoso Downs, NM; Big Bend, WV; and City of War, WV, likewise have not created a single job between them, despite having been obligated, with Atchison County, a combined $47 million in stimulus funding through the RUS.

How many jobs would entrepreneurs have created around the country with that money? If the answer is “at least one”, we can say the government wasted our money. Yet quite a few otherwise smart people in Washington decided, against reason, that they are smarter than the rest of us. Indeed, they staked our well-being on the proposition that they are smarter than all of us.

They failed. Worse, we allowed them to bet our money on a program that was destined to fail from its very conception. A few of us can not manage our affairs better than all of us. No bureaucrat in Washington knows how to spend your money or build your business better than you. No bureaucrat knows better how to revitalize a community better than the people who live in the community. Again, the Stimulus Bill has shown us what I’m sure we already knew. Perhaps next time some bright politician comes up with another big government program to do what we know we can do better ourselves, we’ll stop them before they spend again.