I have a better idea. Since we are spending money we don’t have, we may as well sell land we don’t have.
Even better, land we possess but don’t own. Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
Then Somalia, North Korea… you know, those places that could be put to better use.
Psst… Denmark and the Netherlands are different countries.
Heh, crap. Thats what I get for posting late. Apologies.
Starter country for sale. Fixer-upper. Motivated seller.
Because it never will be “paid off” as long as the US keeps running budget deficts. One should never attempt to sell off assets until you balance your budget.
The land is not worth enough money to pay off the amounts of US debt.
Who is going to buy it? Nobody has enough money to buy all that land.
10 years from now, there will not be enough money existing in the entire world to pay off the US debt.
You dont need to sell any land. If you just cut spending and continually run federal budget surpluses, you can eliminate all the debt without selling anything.
Who would be able to buy this land? The very people who looted the treasury and destroyed the financial system ,thats who. They deserve an opportunity to buy and make private the pristine lands protected from use for generations. It was not easy to pull off the destruction of the banking system while accumulating incredible wealth. They earned it.
Here’s an idea. Why not open a publicly-owned energy company. Before you laugh, look here, here, here, and here. The revenue charts looks like these state-owned facilities generate about 100 billion dollars in revenue a year. That’s not a lot, but it’s tangible income that, in conjunction with cuts in spending and higher taxes, could be used to reduce the deficit mid-to-longterm.
I’m going to (charitably) assume that you didn’t actually think about this statement before posting it.
Just who do you think out there 10 years from now is going to have **200 trillion dollars **in cash sitting around to pay off the US debt ?
Be specific, name names.
If the United States defaults on all its debt in 2020, if the US dollar and all US bonds are worthless, if all dollar demominated currencies and derivitives/IMF credits,etc are worthless, if all exports to the US are ended, who out there is going to still be rich enough to have $200 trillion dollars?
No, what we need to do is have Constitutional Amendments that:
Not even remotely feasible. Have you read an actual study that breaks down how this would work?
You can read the raw data straight from the U.S. Government. I just looked at it, and found the following:
The total tax collected from all of those people is roughly $200 billion dollars.
Their total income earned in 2008 was about 700 billion, or less than half the deficit.
So, if you doubled their taxes, then using static scoring you could raise about $200 billion dollars more - which is a little more than half of the interest on the debt. But to manage that, you’d have to raise their marginal rate to somewhere around 70%. If you did that, you would see more tax avoidance, and you’d see a lot of them move their assets out of the country. You’d be lucky to raise another hundred billion or so, as a guess. Which wouldn’t even begin to make a dent in the debt. Even if there were no interest, an extra 100 billion a year would require over 200 years to pay off the debt.
Just to give you an idea of how big a hole you’re in, the entire taxable income of everyone in the United States is only about 5.6 trillion dollars per year - of which one trillion is already taxed. That leaves 4.6 trillion dollars, and you have a deficit of 1.6 trillion.
You liberals are just going to have to come to grips with the fact that the rich don’t have enough money to pay for all the goodies that have been promised to the poor and middle classes.
There are two realistic ways to cut the deficit: One is to have a wide-ranging Value Added Tax, which does not exempt the poor and middle class. The VAT would have to be in the range of 20% to balance the budget if it applied to all goods and services. If you start exempting things like food for the poor and education and middle class health care and all the rest, you’ll need a higher rate.
The other option is to cut spending. Dramatically. And mostly around entitlements for the middle class - health care and retirement benefits. Unfortunately, you’re going in the other direction.
Also, the states have to reform their public pension and benefit programs. They’re not even part of the federal debt we’re talking about, but they’ve promised too much to public servants, and the shortfall is over a trillion dollars.
If you want to do it without much pain the way Canada did, you have to start now. You have to hold entitlement spending growth to a couple of points below GDP growth, and maintain that year after year. The longer you wait, the more painful it will be. And the longer you wait, the more baby boomers retire, and the bigger the retirement lobby gets, constraining future cost-cutting.
You’re all dithering and blaming each other while Rome burns.
Where did you come up with the figure of two hundred trillion? The deficit is currently less than fourteen trillion.
I think you’re missing the point here, Susanann; how can there be more debt than there is money? What money would be owed? Someone has to lend you the money.
And in 10 years, the U.S. national debt won’t be 200 trillion dollars. Heaven knows where you came up with that number, but the U.S. federal government won’t even spend that much in the next 10 years.
Sam, you wrote a really good post full of facts, and had to pollute it with partisan bullshit?
This isn’t a liberal problem, nor is it a conservative problem. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for creating the debt and they’re both gonna have to pay it off. How on earth can you say this problem’s a LIBERAL problem? You know the Republicans are equally guilty, right?
It might not be a liberal problem, but “soak the rich” is a liberal solution, and that is what Sam was responding to.
Yeah but there are these real good leads in Williamson’s office.
Sadly, they’re only for closers. But maybe we could break in and get them…
There isn’t enough cash in the world to pay off the US debt now. Cash is a tiny, tiny fraction of the money supply - less than one twentieth, in the US.
“All dollar denominated currencies”? Are you under the impression that the other currencies named “dollars” are somehow related to the US dollar? They’re not; it’s just a name. Ours wasn’t even the first currency to use the name.
If you mean currencies pegged to the dollar, there are only 22 of them, most of which belong to Caribbean islands. Most of the Gulf currencies are pegged to the dollar, but they could switch to Euro pegging tomorrow if they wanted to.
I’m not at all sure you understand what you’re saying, in any case. If the US defaults on its debt, it won’t matter if anyone can afford to pay it off.
In any event, the US debt will not be 200 trillion dollars in 2020, or even in 2050, for that matter.
My comment was completely on point. The liberal solution is to raise taxes on the rich, while at the same time giving more benefits to the poor and middle class. The fundamental problem with this is that the ultra-rich is a very small group, and there’s simply a limited amount of money you can get out of them. I was responding directly to foolsguinea’s belief that you can fix the deficit by simply increasing taxes on anyone making over 2 million per year. You can’t. There aren’t enough of them, and they don’t have enough money. And in a globalized world you are constrained in how much you can extract from them before they pack up and leave, or at least move their business activity elsewhere.
The U.S. government at the state and federal level has been in denial about the basic facts of this for a long time, and as a result it has promised more entitlements to people than it can possibly pay out under any reasonable tax environment. Either you raise taxes so much you destroy America’s competitiveness, or you cut entitlements and tell people to start looking after their own affairs a little more.
I completely agree. Welcome to the libertarian side of the house.
Where we roll our eyes at the never-ending petty debates on this board between Coke vs. Pepsi…I mean, Demopublicans vs Republocrats…whoops, I mean Republicans vs Democrats. Those debates are usually less substantative than how to properly arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
You are absolutely correct in that both parties are equally guilty. However, the current administration chose to address the smoldering fire of the Bush administration’s spending habits by throwing gasoline on it.
Those who continue to argue that the remedy for the several-hundred billion dollar deficits of the Bush administration is increased government regulation and oversight, increased taxes and cost of employment and hiring, and trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see can only be living in world of total and complete cognitive dissonance. If you watch Robert Gibbs, Tim Geithner and other recent pronouncements from the White House (Biden is the best, by far) you see them contort themselves into increasingly pretzel-shaped logical arguments to explain how somehow this is all going to translate into a booming economy and jobs for everyone.
Smaller government. Lower burdens and restrictions to capital formation, employment and hiring. Free trade. More choice and empowerment to citizens in terms of how to school their children, choose their healthcare options and plan for their retirement. Sensible approaches to externalities like impacts on the environment.
I’ll vote for a twelve-fingered, pot-smoking Rastafarian who intones Gregorian chants and takes mud baths at noon every day who subscribes to the above principles. I don’t care what party they choose to affiliate themselves to.
The rich have doubled their share of the national income since 1980 not coincidentally just when we started slashing their tax rates and ringing up huge deficits. There’s a simple way in which America can afford to pay future obligations. Get the wealthy to pay a share of taxation closer to their historical levels and cut excess profits out of the healthcare system with a universal healthcare system. Increasing healthcare costs represent pretty much the entire growth in long term debt, fix healthcare and there’s no more problem. Tax the wealthy and US corporations more fairly and the short and medium term dificit disappears too.
Here’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on US taxes, a guy who covered the US taxation system and fiscal/budget situation for a couple of decades for the NYT, so knows a little bit about the subject, to explain what to do :