This article in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/weekinreview/07calmes.html?ref=weekinreview) suggests just how dificult it is going to be to decrease the national debt.
To illustrate the scale of the problem, consider the impact on the deficit of some of the most consistently popular ideas from would-be budget cutters on the left and the right, and a few even more improbable proposals as well.
Think foreign aid is a waste? If you erase every dime, you’d cut the deficit ... by 3 percent. Abolish welfare payments? You will have cut even less of the deficit. Stop spending on Afghanistan and Iraq? You’d still be more than $1 trillion in the red.
The biggest and fastest-growing share of the budget still goes for mandatory entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that no elected official wants to cut, and for interest payments on the debt, which they cannot cut without inviting a default.
What if you kept just the entitlement programs and got rid of everything else? You’d have a modest surplus — about $109 billion. But there would be no one left to mail the benefit checks.
I think that we all probably worry about our growing national debt. However, I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know exactly what the effects of having such an increasingly large debt can be. Am I correct in thinking that the primary worry is that, as the U.S's debt gets progressively bigger, it will become increasingly hard, perhaps eventually impossible, to find buyers for U.S government bonds?
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a serious problem, especially because baby boomers are starting to retire and in a few years we will have a higher percentage of senior citizens than we ever have. This means social security spending by the government will significantly increase... The future looks bleak.
ReplyDeleteAs our national debt rises do other nations look at us and decide that maybe it isn't a good idea to trade with us? I know that having morea and more debt stock pile each year for is will make things harder for us to do other things. Personally the war in iraq expenditures that were spent so far could easily have beens pent on national debt right now if we were out of it.
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, thi really puts a lot of things into perspective. It is pretty upsetting how much it would take to even make a dent in the national debt.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I still think that it is time to bring those troops back home.
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I think that our future looks pretty scary. It looks scary in the fact that the variables involved in our nation's debt dont seem to have a solution yet in sight. Social security being the main problem. Social security spending by the government will continue to increase without any signs of slowing down.
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