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WASHINGTON, May 27 (Reuters) - The United States' huge national debt -- now topping $13 trillion -- is becoming a major threat to U.S. security and leadership in the world, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday.
"The United States must be strong at home in order to be strong abroad," Clinton said in remarks on the Obama administration's new national security doctrine, which was made public on Thursday.
"We cannot sustain this level of deficit financing and debt without losing our influence, without being constrained in the tough decisions we have to make," Clinton said, adding that it was time to "make the national security case about reducing the deficit and getting the debt under control."
The new Obama security strategy joins diplomatic engagement with economic discipline and military power to boost America's standing, and pledges expanded partnerships with rising powers like India and China to share the global burden.
Clinton emphasized controlling the budget deficit, saying it was "personally painful" for her to see the yawning U.S. spending gap after her husband, former President Bill Clinton, ended his second term in 2001 with budget surpluses.
"That was not just an exercise in budgeteering. It was linked to a very clear understanding of what the United States needed to do to get positioned to lead for the foreseeable future, far into the 21st century," she said.
Clinton said that as a Democratic U.S. senator from New York during the administration of former President George W. Bush, she had voted against "tax cuts that were never sustainable, wars that were never paid for" -- but without success.
"Now we're paying the piper," she said.
Clinton in February blamed "outrageous" advice from Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in part for the grim U.S. deficit picture.
You know things are bad when even the big spenders are calling for a time out!
She's not calling for a time out. Rather she's calling for higher taxes on the rich, repeating the mantra of the 1992 campaign that the rich are not paying their "fair share."
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