Group Launches Campaign to Raise Awareness About Soaring National Debt

A nonprofit advocacy group has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to raise awareness about America's soaring federal debt.

The multimedia campaign is trying to hammer its message on all fronts. It includes a Web site -- Defeatthedebt.com, which features a rolling odometer showing the red ink at over $11 trillion -- and a startling new TV ad. The ad shows school children pledging allegiance to the national debt.

"And to the Chinese government that lends us money, and to the interest, for which we pay, compoundable, with higher taxes and lower pay until the day we die," the school children in the ad say.

Organizers say it's a critical educational campaign to inform the public of the real-world consequences of owing so much on the national credit card.

"We're also trying to get people to understand who we owe all this debt to, and the leverage that foreign governments and foreign banks have over this country when they start to accumulate that much debt," said Rick Berman, executive director of the Employment Policies Institute, the conservative group behind the campaign.

Taken together, this year's $787 billion economic stimulus package, the ongoing rescue of American automakers and new proposals to spend $1 trillion reforming health care may make it tempting, to some, to blame President Obama for the sea of red ink. The projected federal deficit this year is $1.6 trillion.

But analysts like Steven Weisman, who covered fiscal policy for The New York Times before joining the Petersen Institute for International Economics last year, say everyone is to blame.

"Not least the Congress, the president under both parties in the last several years," he said. "It's a matter of arithmetic more than politics. Taxes were cut but spending went up. ... War costs have driven up spending for the military. And both sides of the aisle have embraced increased spending in the military."

Obama and his advisers repeatedly have pointed to the red ink already on the books when they took over the White House from President Bush and his advisers.

"Having inherited a trillion-dollar deficit that will take a long time for us to close, we need to focus on what we need to move the economy forward, not on what's nice to have," Obama said in February.

Indeed, a core element of the conservative critique against Bush was that non-defense discretionary spending increased under his watch by nearly 21 percent.

But as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, the national debt for 2009 and in the years to come is projected to exceed anything seen in the Bush administration's first or second term.

"They're correct in saying they inherited a big debt from President Bush. But they -- because of the economy, because of their spending programs -- they're on their way to expanding on that debt," Weisman said.

FOX News' James Rosen contributed to this report.