Who keeps the official calculater anyway?
But I digress… the real question is whether the federal government could stop spending money for a day… or at least shut it down enough that revenue would exceed spending.
If so the next question would be whether it could do it for two days…and then start spending only what it takes in.
Raise taxes until revenue = spending. Problem solved.
Everyone with a political philosophy knows for certain that their chosen method is the only one that could possibly have any benefit. Of course, they don’t really know what the social and economic consequences of their method would be.
If you drastically cut “services” some folks will die. Others will suffer, and many will become less productive in an economic sense. Crime would increase. Transmission of disease would increase. Highway accidents and mortality would increase. Probably.
If you drastically increase taxes costs of that will be “passed on to the consumer” and eventually the balance would re-adjust to a new level and the economy would slow down proportionately to the drastic level of tax increase. Probably. If you carefully adjust the taxes you increase to affect only some of the taxpayers, those with the most money would have the best chance of moving their wealth into tax reduced sources. Money is fungible. More people would need “services.”
Probably.
Graft and corruption would increase. Certainly.
Tris
Sure. Just stop paying all the troops. And stop all the Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. And close all federal offices, courts, passports, parks, food inspections, science grants, everything. And stop paying interest to foreign bondholders. I’m sure they’ll all understand.
If you start tomorrow, you’d only have to keep not paying people until mid-September. What’s 149 days without pay? Who would notice?
Why didn’t anyone think of this before?
Bill Clinton not only stopped the debt from increasing, he actually started reducing it. Of course, then Bush came in and not only reversed Bill’s trend, but bumped up the debt to about the point where it would have been if Bill’s spending policies had never been done.
Cite:
This illustrates the problem of paying down the debt. It could be done, but not during the term of one president (at least, not without some extremely negative economic and social consequences), and chances are you aren’t going to get a whole series of presidents in office who are all committed to reducing the debt.
And then, even if you do pay it off, someone else will probably come along and just charge it all back up again. The national debt was pretty much paid off a few times in the 1800s and again in the early 1900s,and look where it is now.
You really shouldnt be looking at the government as a machine that can be shut down for temporary savings. It isn’t a carpet factory. A lot of these big military spending contracts are just that - contracts. So what if you don’t do anything on Tuesday, you still have a legal obligation to pay them.
Many contracts have cancellations fees. So even if you cut some bloated runaway military pork you still have to pay all sorts of fines or even the full amount of the contract depending on the terms. The idea that shutdowns save money is faulty. If anything they cost money.
Since this is a politically loaded question, I think it’s best suited to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
To borrow from the “household income” analogies that Republicans are so fond of, what happens if you stop spending money for a day, What the…?
Two days? Eight? I assume that after about two weeks, you’ll have lost your job because you won’t be able to get to work, but if you have no expenses then you won’t be needing any income.
Well, in fairness, by mid-September a lot of people (including deployed troops, presumably) will have starved to death or died due to lack of medical care or heating oil. So they’ll notice, and they won’t understand, but since they’ll be dead they won’t actually be able to complain about it.
If we extended the program, we could kill off nearly everyone, and then we wouldn’t even need to run at a deficit in the first place.
Win-win-win, really.
Could it do so legally? No. The budget for the rest of the fiscal year has been approved, and it includes spending more than it will take in.
Is it a good idea? Probably not, no matter what some members of the peanut gallery might believe.
Raise more money or spend a lot less.
I often hear that government should be run like a business. Let me ask you: if a business is in the red, do they just stop working until they are profitable again?
Of course, we heard that very often from a president who ran up the debt like crazy, increased spending, cut revenue, and tried to manipulate the picture by keeping some major expenses off the books.
Sounds like the management of a couple of companies that I have worked for. 
I raise the point because the OP seems to be one that would think that a government should be run like a business.
Of course, I am the last to suggest that the government should be run like a business. That’s like saying a hockey team should be run like an Olympic skating team. Businesses should be run like businesses, governments like governments, and families like families.
But I am reminded of the comedian (I think it may have been Will Durst) who said that if he were president, he’d run the country like a business: burn it to the ground and collect the insurance money.
Republicans are completely full of shit. They fight for nominal spending cuts of things like the arts and Planned Parenthood but have no problem with slashing revenues (i.e., tax cuts) by hundred’s of billions.
Of course both sides of the aisle have entire parallel universes full of bullshit upon which they can draw, so that isn’t what I would call a stinging criticism.
The fact of the matter is that both tax increases and spending cuts are going to be required. I could be wrong about this but I seem to recall that just letting the Bush tax cuts expire would be enough to stabilize the deficit.
I’m basically not a very politically oriented person, but some of crap I hear from the self-righteous right is just annoying as hell - not to mention idiotic and hypocritical.
It doesn’t have to be that complicated. The federal government could still fund all these things and keep sending out the checks to pay for them.
Then all we have to do is shut down the post office before the checks arrive.
Checks? What millennium do you live in?
By an immense force of political will, radical politicians on left and right (we’re talking Tea Party/Kucinich level radical here) might be able to prune back programs and raise taxes enough to balance the budget. And I’m talking serious, painful, blood-in-the-streets measures here. We can’t just soak the rich, we’ll also need to raise middle class taxes by one-third. We can’t just “eliminate waste,” we also have to significantly cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. All right-thinking people will be outraged; sob stories will flood the newspapers. Most likely, most of these brave politicians will be booted from their seats in the next election. But at least we’ll have balanced the budget.
…And next year, the lobbying-industrial complex gets back to work, and government largesse once again gets doled out to well-connected interest groups.
So, the answer is no. The culture of “I’ve got to get my slice” is too entrenched - it is more profitable in many cases to lobby for favors than to create value. Default, here we come!
There is no political will for this. Politicians act towards their short term benefits, regardless of whatever side of their mouth the shit is spewing out of. Politicians benefit from spending money locally. They don’t benefit from cutting even the most useless of programs in their home districts. So with a wink and a nod, they’ll propose to close another politician’s boondoggle, while s/he in turn proposes to close some local sacred cow. Suddenly they compromise, nothing is cut, and everyone votes to add more and more to the budget, consequences be damned.
State and local services then get shafted, as they must actually balance their budgets when revenues fall. Local governments can’t spend themselves into oblivion. Still, every time even the most inconsequential service (left to the individual reader to define) sees its budget cut, the news crews are out there, and the party opposite the local patron is casting blame. Until the general public starts recognizing the usual political dance rather than always portraying everything as ‘us-vs-them’, we’re fucked.
ETA: which is essentially what athelas said as I was writing. I should take so long to make a single post.
Uh, basically… yes! Businesses and households do it all of the time.
It’s a simple matter of waiting a few days to write the checks until more money has come in.
I’m not suggesting it’s a long-term solution. I was trying to get more at the procedure of calculating the debt.
Thanks for all of the political answers…maybe I’ll try again in GQ.