How do you propose we pay off the 18 trillion dollar debt cloud hanging over the US?

Say that Liberals had unlimited control of the government for the next year and they could do whatever they wanted to it. How would you pay off the debt?

Take not that interest is roughly 500 billion a year and we are running a 483 billion dollar deficit according to USA Today, therefore we need to come up with 983 billion just to break even, that doesn't even count beginning to pay off the debt. Defense spending accounts for something like 700 billion dollars which won't cut it, even if you remove the entire military. How then do you propose we get rid of the debt?

 

With lawyers, pens and paper.

 

Lots of war too

 

Against small countries or weak countries our Air Force can single-handedly destroy. Keeps the bigger barbarians at bay.

 

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I was thinking "lawyers, guns and money."
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Well we can either borrow more to pay the debt(as we are basically doing now) or........as history shows, when one Country owes another more money than they can pay back, they attack that Country and hope to wipe them out; Debt gone.

 

The public debt will never be paid off. Debt of a country that can issue its own currency should not be compared to household debt, yet, this is a mistake that is not only made continuously on this forum, but also by self-proclaimed fiscal hawks in congress.

 

Giving the very rich a few more massive tax cuts would solve the debt problem in no time, ask any conservative or neoconservative.

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“Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger - Richard Nixon’s U.S. National Security Adviser

 

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Severe cuts to the DOD budget with the exception of anything concerning our veterans. Start with axing the F-35 program.
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Cut the entire military and tax the banks 95% of their total assets

 

Bribes and/or force are applied if we can't legally wrangle ourselves through a problem. That is a common prescription. In today's market however, with such hyper globalized interests at stake, variations from the default playbook may not be used or even be effective. It is rather difficult to truly grasp the internal going-ons without having internal access. Are we in decline or are we still growing? Without access to said internal information, we rely on those who tell us the version they're allowed to publicly state or from their interpretation of data we are not able to look at ourselves I.e. they're not showing us their math.

But offsetting U.S. debt, if America is as strong as official orthodoxy states, is as simple as using lawyers. Debts are forgiven all the time, on small and large scales, but lawyers the world over. It then becomes the matter of coming to those terms anyway, the very discussion of striking a whole bunch of debt clean. If the U.S. resets, it resets everyone else too. That carries implications in itself and creates the dilemma of, "Well, how do we restart and what do we use as an artificial symbol of wealth and currency?"

In Fallout 3, currency is Bottle Caps. In our world, paper and small metallic like objects are currency -- digital currency is also being tested out. So on a basic fundamental level, it is laughable how badly an object artificially deemed 'important' can mess up the lives of billions of people. "My paper buys me more stuff." Well, paper is going to collapse. How it is collapsing in the first place is laughable in itself too. Heads-of-state the world over created and have continued this mainstream system of wealth and currency. Contributing to the demise of this system is a very human element -- Us versus Them. Add a dash of 'survival of the strongest' I.e. a strong military, and we've seen the strong take from the weak time-and-time-again. Look at the gulf of distance between a country like America and a country like Somalia. Never mind what the U.S. has done to Somalia militarily, that's not the important point here. The important point is that because the U.S. is dominant militarily to Somalia, it can dictate terms as it sees fit. America's stature in the world grew enormous during and after World War II. The U.S. came out on top of a great power struggle that had been going on since man came about. But just because the U.S. is and has been the dominant player since World War II does not mean that the U.S. will always be the dominant player. Whether it remains that way or not is dependent on how the elite in America, the West and everywhere else act and what decisions they make. Just as it was decided for the British Empire to be deconstructed and replaced by the American Empire, so to can it be decided that the American Empire is going to be replaced by some other country who will rule supreme to all others.

 

Wouldn't work. Might as well allow all fifty states to secede from the federal government at that point. What you suggest would destabilize the U.S. to the point of social anarchy. Eliminating the entire military removes, obviously, the entire military, which, obviously, includes domestic defense. No National Guard. No Coast Guard. No Air Force. No Navy. No Marine Corps. No Special Forces. Nothing. With all of the resources the U.S. has under the ground and above ground, with no military whatsoever, we'd be invaded in no time. And taxing the banks at 95% of their assets would have the effect of banks being so tightly wound around the remaining 5% of what they earn that vital things like loans and investments would come screeching to a halt. But, and I am assuming here, based off your username, you want the U.S. to sink. Why? Because your prescription ensures that that happens.

 

It's important to understand the difference between a national debt and a national deficit, pretty much all countries have a national debt, the US's is about $46K per person, Canada's is $47k, the UK's is $42K, Japan's is $97k per person

A national debt is not something that needs to be immediately payed back, there are multiple countries who are still paying off their national debt for WWI (that's 97 years)

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I looked it up and there are only 5 countries that do not have a national debt, Macau, British Virgin Islands, Bruneo, Liechtenstein, and Palau

out of these countries, Macau has the highest population, with about 500,000 people (more people live in the state of Rhode Island)

 

My strategy would be to keep interest rates low, reduce or eliminate the deficit, and use a pro-growth strategy when deciding which Federal budget items to fund or cut.

It can be done, but I think it would take about 30 years or so to start seeing results at tackling the debt.

 

$18 trillion of debt is not the big problem. $80 trillion of unfunded entitlements are the larger problem.

 

Good to see more progressives admitting they are socialists.

 

Please do let us know what your proposed pro-growth strategies are, while eliminating the debt at the same time.

You do realize that paying off the public debt (a surplus) would create a serious drag on the economy? That's why no politician in office and in their right mind would actually do it (Reagan didn't pay of debt either, despite all his rethoric). Of course it is easy for the fiscal hawks to posture when they are not in e real position to make the required budget cuts happen. Once they are in such a position, it is tax and spend for the Democrats and tax less and still spend the same for the GOP.

 

The majority of US debt is owned by US citizens. Are we going to invade the US?

 

If - in your haste to bash success and conservatism - you miss the fact that a prosperous economy is the first component necessary in the recipe to pay off debt, you can be forgiven. It is easy to be blind to everything when focused only on one or two things you hate I guess.

Seems quite logical to allow those who have proven capable of making an economic engine operate to do so, without punitively taxing their incentive to do so.

Right?

 

Well, I've already said a little about that. Low interest rates keeps the debt from growing as fast and that reduces our payments to interest on the debt.

I like to hear the pros and cons of each budget item. To understand what people expect to happen, or what their goals are, to cut or raise an item.

And cut only a little, or raise an item only a little at a time, like say 0.2 billion so that there's a small but measurable affect.

Perhaps I would form a committee or two to examine each budget item and see what affect raising or cutting the funding of an item has on the overall picture, especially compared to the expectation of what would happen.

And, I would leave funding levels at a static level for two years, instead of raising the funding every year to adjust for inflation.

 

First rule for getting out of a hole is to quit digging.

Also, we should be talking about $20 trillion in debt because that is what the next POTUS will be looking at on inauguration day.

 

Well I think taxing the banks 95% would make every single bank insolvent. They would all close, everyone would lose all of their money except for the FDIC insurances amounts (assuming Congress decides to deficit spend enough to pay that owed amount). That would be basically destroy the country.

 

Cut the number of Federal workers 50%. No one will ever miss them.

 

Sadly, for the last 12 to 14 years (actually much longer), the so-called "job creators", worshiped as gods by the right wing, haven't used their tax cuts to make that economic engine run at more than an idle. Back in the 1950s, when the unions were strong, the higher taxes paid by the very rich (which Reagan and the right-wingers claim were too high) were invested by the government in building the infrastructure, etc. Those investments kept the economic engine of that era running at top speed.

Back in the good-old-days, the fat cats were raking in profits, and they were offered tax incentives for stimulating the economy. These rewards were bestowed upon the fat cats only AFTER they provided growth and created jobs. However, with the introduction of Reagan's voodoo economics, the fat cats began receiving their rewards up front. Instead of growth and increased employment, we now see downsizing, outsourcing, and other cuts to provide short-term profits become the corporate model.

This voodoo economic system leaves nothing to motivate the fat cats to stimulate growth here at home. Conservatives and neoconservatives have yet to realize lay-offs and sending factories to Asia to boost the quarterly bottom line cannot be done forever. Soon, there are no more employees to lay-off, no more factories to send overseas, and no other cuts available.

Now-a-days, conservatives and neoconservatives are not only content with wages stagnating, they demand workers take pay cuts, so the fat cats they love can pocket more money. Those wonderful "job creators", (with skills touted by the right-wingers) that make that economic engine run, are putting the fuel (dollars) anywhere they can to guarantee middle and lower income workers are left out in the cold.

But, you can be forgiven. It is easy to be blind to everything when focused only on one or two things you hate I guess.

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we could do like greece and just renounce the debt

or we could have the fed buy up all the debt

or we could have a modest tax increase back to 1990s levels
and just agree to close absolutely all tax loop holes

we could have a 60% tax on all political and super pac and lobbying contributions