Does Public Debt Equal the American Dream?
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- Category: Bryan Vinson
- Published on Monday, 24 January 2011 13:17
- Written by Bryan Vinson
The National public debt is nearing $14 trillion. The debt per citizen would be around $45,000 to pay it off in full. But wait! Only about half the country pays taxes! Let's revise that number to around $126,000 per tax paying citizen to pay the national debt off in full. That is an important factor as we look ahead to the next session of Congress with a President that is running budget deficits over a trillion dollars, and has championed one near trillion dollar piece of legislation after another. As we look ahead, we should also look at the previous administration that ran deficits in the billions and increased government spending.
We can go even further back to when Franklin D. Roosevelt made high taxing, big spending, ever expanding government fashionable, to track how we got here today. Like a teenager with a credit card, the debt has been growing ever since. $202 billion in our budget represents the interest on our debt that we are paying alone. Anyone with a credit card knows that you start out with a cute little fifteen dollar minimum, but as the debt grows so does the minimum. It can reach a breaking point, where the minimum takes a good chunk of your income. The federal government is just as vulnerable to the laws of economics as anyone else, and the amount of money it can borrow for its programs is not infinite. The budget items might be essential, discretionary, noble compassionate entitlement, or defense, but eventually the ability to fund it will be strained no matter how moral the endeavor is.
The Obama administration has followed the spending solution pattern over the first two years. Though he campaigned on being fiscally responsible, he later flip-flopped saying that spending was the point of the big spending stimulus bill. The President and the then Democrat-controlled Congress set out to spend the government into the role of the hero of the people. The policies had little effect and we'll be starting 2011 in maybe only a little better shape than we started 2009, with many of the same problems. It turns out you can't buy heroics. While Obama embraced the same ideology of FDR during the Depression of the 1930's, he's getting the same result, and here we are another trillion dollars in debt. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton relied on us, we the people, to drive their economic successes. Yes, even Bill Clinton reaped the benefits of tax cuts. Clinton enjoyed government budget surpluses in '98 and '99 after signing the government revenue doubling tax payer relief act of 1997. With no "Cold War" or "War on Terror" to spend money fighting, and no market bubbles bursting to erase his economic gains, Clinton had a free lane toward budgetary success. Unfortunately, neither he nor Congress could bring themselves to throw that surplus at the national debt, which went up every fiscal year of his presidency despite the surpluses. That money was eventually spent too.
We have come to the point where we should be asking if any more significant debt would be helpful. At what point do you say that enough spending is enough spending? At what point do you admit that certain concepts aren't working that well, and need to be revised and reformed instead of just receiving more funding. Are we so numb to the excessive nature of value involved in the number 14 trillion that we can't muster the discipline to put away the plastic and stop devoting $200 billion of our taxed earned income to our creditors? Has anyone noticed the decline in work ethic, innovation, perseverance, care of family and fellow man by the individual, and educational motivation that has followed the government's attempt to fill all these needs over the past 80 years? We must now go in a different direction. As we start a new political term, with a new conservative, fiscally responsible House of Representatives, maybe we can get the house of this nation in order. We the people must demand it, or it will not happen no matter how fiscally responsible our candidates claim to be. In 1994, we elected the Republicans the majority of Congress with the hopes of fiscal responsibility. The national debt was $4 trillion. When they were voted out 12 years later the debt was $8 trillion. The Democrats did no better, adding $6 trillion more in just the past four years. We've been spinning our wheels the whole time.
A quote, from someone who helped found and lead a powerful and prosperous nation:
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds.... we will have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers into account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure in principle in one instance becomes precedent for another... till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automation's of misery... and the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in it's train wretchedness and oppression." - Thomas Jefferson
