Our national debt, now $13 trillion, is not just a burden on our children’s future. It is a burden on our own.

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows that we’ve run a $941 billion deficit in the first eight months of FY 2010 (see chart below).

There are consequences for this sort of deficit spending; according to recent article from CNN Money, it means slower economic growth and higher interest payments.

These are not abstract consequences for someone else to deal with:

• If our economy is growing slowly, it means that fewer goods are being produced and purchased than would be otherwise. This translates to fewer jobs to fill, and fewer paychecks to go around – a big deal when there are still 15 million Americans unemployed.
• If interest payments rise, it means bigger bills to pay each month. The interest rates on mortgages, credit cards, and just about any other kind of loan are affected by the rate on US Treasuries. If investors demand a higher interest rate to compensate for the larger risk of lending to a country that’s $13 trillion in debt, we’ll all end up paying the price.

All of this worry would be for naught if the government – still recovering from a recession – was set to return to a sustainable fiscal path. But the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, has told us just the opposite – we’re on an unsustainable fiscal path that’s projected to get worse under current policy.

The new health care law threatens to drive our debt even higher, and cuts popular programs like Medicare Advantage to pay for all the new spending.

The consequences of a $13 trillion national debt are deadly serious, and we’re not going to be able to wait for our kids to deal with them – our representatives in Congress need to take action to stop spending, and they need to do it now.