How bad US debt is
Let's be honest, debt is a huge, huge problem for the United States of America. The annual national income is generally over $3 trillion. It seems great until you realize that the national debt is up to $21 trillion. The US would have to go 7 years without spending a single cent in order to get rid of its' burden. 7 years. Besides, the annual US spending quite easily exceeds a single cent. Which is logical. What's not logical is that the general annual US spending exceeds the general annual national income. Just this year, the US budget is up to over $4 trillion. Therefore, this year will add over $1 trillion to the US' debt. Instead of cutting the debt, the US is increasing it. Unless this is dealt with, the US WILL have to pay for this sort of negligence somewhere down the line. Then again, it is hard to cut down spending costs. You can't shut down Medicare; imagine the scenes! It's not possible to shut down any government-funded corporations. People who rely on food or services from the government would all of a sudden be left high and dry. If the government cuts spending at all, let alone for a year, let alone seven, so much of the population would be thrown into chaos. It's a huge mess.
I think that it is interesting how you point out that we can't cut out Medicare or aid services. I agree that we can't cut these programs in order to balance our budget. However, we can cease giving needless tax breaks to the most affluent individuals and corporations. For example, Amazon made $5.6 billion in profits and got $789 million in tax CUTS (meaning they paid $0 in taxes and actually got paid $789 million). Additionally, we can cut our military spending and implement Medicare for all. People commonly point out that introducing Medicare for all would cost between $28-32 trillion. However, they forget that switching to Medicare for all would save $2 trillion over 10 years is it cost the maximum $32 trillion (this statistic is based on a Koch Brothers study which most likely minimized the savings because they are a conservative group). Overall, we can minimize the debt by taxing individuals with a progressive tax, reduce military spending, and implementing Medicare for all.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good post! One of the things that stood out to me was that it would take seven years for the US to be completely rid of its debt, and that's only if no one spent a single cent on anything. This interests me because I think it would be pretty much impossible, given how much people like to spend money, for the US to ever be fully rid of its excessive amount of debt. If the government decided to cut Medicare, millions of people aged 65 and older would not be able to afford healthcare. I honestly feel like if the government decided to stop funding some of the prisons, and instead stopped incarcerating so many people, it would be able to get rid of a lot of its debt. It costs between approximately $31,000 and $60,000 per inmate per year, which is a lot, so cutting the amount of inmates in prisons could really help the debt situation.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you showed the significance of the American debt in the face of an image we have of having the largest economy in the world. Being the land of opportunities and such. The US for a long time has been a consumer rather than a producer. Our capitalist system creates more of internal smaller businesses while we import mass cheaper products from places like China. Globalization has been a huge part of if and if we dont figure it out our debt will continue to become more and more impossible to dampen. One way to help fix it is trade deficits although I dont have specific ways to lessen them, redoing our trade deals and such to decrease our trade deficts would be a great way to decrease our debt long term. On the other hand similar to what Peter said. Cutting unnecessary costs such as our military and adjusting our tax cuts to accurately increase tax revenue while not hurting the majority of Americans (not the 1%). With these two ideas we can begin to decrease our spending and increase our revenue helping us gradually pay off our debt.
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