Let’s put some numbers in play, shall we?
The Federal Budget proposal for FY 2000** was $1.77 trillion. Of this, $21.3 billion were earmarked for “International Affairs programs”. For a grand total of 1.167% of the total budget outlay. To put that into terms we can really get our minds around, it is equivalent to $585, if you have a household income of $35,000. The image of Foreign Aid as a black hole that is draining the country dry does not hold up under close examination.
As of 11/2/00, the National Debt is currently $5,691,725,335,190.51, and the interest expense for the FY 2001 was $361,997,734,302.36. Although you seem to realize the cause of much of this debt, “Reagan years did bring huge deficits…”, one could argue that your grasp of economics is a little tenuous. Although the current budget plans show surpluses, many of them are not ‘real’, but projected surpluses, as pointed out by Collounsbury in the previous post. In 1989, the cost to service the National Debt was 15% of the total budget, the proposed FY2001 budget earmarks 11% ($208 billion) of total for service on the national debt. The projected surplus of $184 billion is designated to pay down the National Debt. If the money is used for a tax-cut instead, that portion of the budget required to service the interest cost on the debt is unlikely to decrease.
I’m all for tax cuts, but to use the money that we could use to pay down the debt sounds too much like going out and spending your $3,500 ‘bonus’ on a new big screen TV when you make $35,000 a year and have $108,000 of credit card debt. Then again, we could probably avoid the whole issue by throwing in the ‘surplus’ as an actual part of the budget called “Debt paydown” or something similar. As long as it’s a part of the budget itself, it can’t be considered a surplus, can it?
Under your theory, it seems more as if the American people don’t want to hold themselves accountable. They want their money back, and to hell with the almost six trillion dollars in debt that we have accrued.
** Money doesn’t make the world go around, inertia does. But it’s much less lyrical that way.
*the full text of the FY2000 budget, in PDF format, can be downloaded from this page, I didn’t create a direct link because it’s a 1.6 MB file.