Study says that even if every american was taxed 100% for a whole year, we won’t be able to pay off our debts. And many feel safe watching tv and going to work in their cars just fine. We don’t feel the storm coming.
But you knew that. So onto the question.
How do we get rid of the debt? Taxes can’t go higher. The two biggest problems are the fact the 1% owns 99% of the wealth. They worked up to it, but now there’s only scraps left for the majority. The second is that even if the wealth was distributed much evenly, the U.S doesn’t exactly export much. It has fooled itself into believing that printing dollars will handle spend, and losses, but countries are already considering and pushing for the death of the dollar. Our money will become like marks after the world war.
So in talking to you, I see two solutions: Export a lot, and increase the wages for lower and middle class by about… 200%.
There’s no point in paying off the debt. It is perfectly fine for a country to have a manageable amount of debt, and there is absolutely no valid reason to expect that our debt should be zero.
So, you are asking the wrong question to begin with.
A good start would be jailing all the crook bankers ( and politicians ) that caused the problem. Then you could introduce some sane economic policies that actually controlled bankers and created jobs, and then you could reform social welfare so people actually had to get of their butts and go get a job.
Singapore had a policy that if you couldn’t find a job you had to cut the grass for your taxpayer money- seems good to me.
As long as you have a vast underclass of unemployed sucking on the taxpayer teat, you are doomed to have massive debt.
Next thing coming, huge inflation ( caused by printing money ) wiping out the value of your money and savings. Trust me, you won’t enjoy that one.
It’s like saying, “If I put my entire salary into paying off my mortgage for a year I would still owe on it.” So what? Should you kill yourself due to impending doom? While I am personally debt adverse, debt is not all bad especially for corporations and governments. Time heals wounds. Unlike individuals, corporations and governments don’t have a limited life span. Debt is manageable. It is mismanagement that is the culprit and still it is correctable.
The doomsayers are always wrong because we are still around. As bad as the financial crash of 2008 was, if you stuck it out, you recovered.
Doggo, join the doomsayers. Lack of inflation is hurting people that saved and invested in “safe” CD’s and instruments like that. My parents set themselves up for retirement by buying annuities during the inflation years of the '80’s.
The deficit wasn’t bad before the recession. In fact if during 2001-2007 we hadn’t had the tax cuts and hadn’t had the war in Iraq we would’ve had surpluses for several years and fairly minor deficits others. The deficit was 1-4% of GDP, the Iraq war and 2001/2003 tax cuts were something like 2-3% of GDP.
There were some fears by the treasury that if the economic policies of the 90s continued (budget surpluses), the debt would be too small by 2012.
If the deficit ever gets down to 1-4% of GDP again, which may happen this decade, it can be brought back into surplus with minor tweaks to policy.
To keep the deficit under wraps you have to really reform our health care system. Something like 80% of the debt we will develop this century are due to health care. If our health care were as efficient as what they have in Europe that wouldn’t be a problem.
I want the debt to be less than it is, because, right now, the interest on the debt is a massive transfer of wealth from all taxpayers to “the lending class,” which is a little more than the top one per cent…but not much more. We’re giving money to the rich. This is really bad economics!
Reduce the debt: a strategic triad. More taxes. Less spending. And “defaults” in the form of inflation. The latter is certainly going to happen, but it would be a bit wiser if we could meet it part way with other, guided approaches.
Let’s reduce the size of our military…just to start with…
Growth will dwindle the size of the debt relative to the GDP over time. Don’t expect to see much economic growth unless it’s been directed straight into the pockets of the politician’s owners.
Who says we don’t export much? The US makes over 20% of all goods manufactured in the world. Our debt to gdp ratio is not that bad when compared with many countries. If you check Wikipedia list of debt to gdp ratio (based on CIA fact book) you will see that Japan, Belgium, Singapore, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, and Austria have higher debt to gdp ratios than the US. We also are in the enviable position that we control the worlds default currency. When oil, gold, or countless other commidities are traded world wide, the deals are done with US dollars more often than not. You are listening to the right wing scare machine, which just 10 short years ago was claiming that deficits didn’t matter and thus two wars and cutting taxes was OK to do. Now that we have a democratic president, deficits do matter and we need to cut social programs so we can cut taxes again when a republican is president again. Its a pretty good play book and it is working well for them.
Personally, I think the US has long term structural problems that we should fix sooner rather than later. Taxes need to go up, there is probably no way to get around that unless we want to turn the US into Mexico ot Columbia where the rich live in walled and gated communities and the poor are fucked. We need to fix Medicare, Medicaid, and especially disability in this country. We need to invest in education and the energy sector to stay competitive. We need to clean up the regulations in our financial sector, either by forcing the bankers to have more skin in the game or by breaking up the banks so one bank cannot take down our whole economy. and we do need to get out deficits under control. But the op is a bit dramatic and full of it.