Donald Trump has been President for over 50 days and with all the craziness that has happened in that time, there really hasn’t been any discussion about the National Debt and our country’s spending problem. Yes, he did make one tweet about him “paying down the debt” but that was just an auto correction in the CBO numbers and since then nothing has been discussed.
Every time we put Republicans in charge of the government there are always these empty promises to be fiscally conservative and attack the deficit/debt. And every time we are lied to and nothing is done. Instead, we have seen the increase in our national debt to numbers that are unheard of. We are approaching $20 Trillion worth of debt with no end in sight and nobody is doing anything about it!
According to the Foundation for Economic Education:
Since 2000, the federal debt has grown at an average annual rate of 8.2%, doubling from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the past eight years alone. Who loaned the government this money? Four groups: foreigners, Americans, the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds. But over the past decade, three of these groups have cut back significantly on their lending.
Foreign investors have slowed the growth in their lending from over 20% per year in the early 2000s to less than 3% per year today. Excluding the Great Recession years, American investors have been cutting back on how much they lend the federal government by an average of 2% each year.
The money train is ruining this country. President Trump talks about building our military arsenal back to full capacity to fight an enemy that is oceans away and ignores the real danger that lurks in the shadows here at home. This is the biggest threat the United Stats faces and neither of the two parties is doing anything to fix the problem.
For nearly a century, politicians have treated deficit spending as a magic wand. In a recession? We need jobs, so government must spend more money! In an expansion? There’s more tax revenue, so government can spend more money! Always and everywhere, politicians argued only about how much to increase spending, never whether to increase spending. A century of this has left us with a debt so large that it dwarfs the annual economic output of the planet. And now we are coming to the point at which there will be no one left from whom to borrow. When creditors finally disappear completely, all that will remain is a reckoning.
There is a reckoning coming. For over a century we have held to this notion that we need to spend more money in order to fix problems in our country. We have fallen into this trap that government can fix the problem so we put the power of the money into the hands of an institution known as the Federal Reserve. Ever since its inception, we have seen the financial turmoil that is plaguing this country.
Free markets work well for a reason and we are not allowing it to happen. We get Republicans and Democrats in charge of Washington that think it’s necessary to use the power of the government to fix problems and they end up spending this country into bankruptcy.
Where are the fiscal-minded people serving in Congress? I can count them on one hand and that is not enough. It will take a complete overhaul of the system and a new brand of thinking to pull us out of our financial situation.
