Chapter 7: Paying Down The National Debt

My bills are too high to expect me to help out the economy.….– kavips

One Trillion shy of all domestic Household debt (14T) , is the debt imposed upon us by “the borrowing of our governments”… local, state, and Federal (13T). The majority (10.4T) is our Federal debt. It should come as no surprise that tackling this task should be our first priority to insure that any short term economic gains we create, are not wiped out months or years later.

We were on a successful track to achieve this goal just 8 years ago… Budget surpluses were projected far into the future, and before our eyes, the whittling down of our national debt actually happened . Today, Generation X’rs and Y’rs simply accept that as fact, that balancing the budget is possible. Very few recognize how much of a miraculous achievement that thing is: a budget surplus… For until Clinton-Gore arrived, no one ever expected our national debt to decrease. But decrease it did and not only did it actually drop within our lifetimes, but a credible path was tracked showing it decreasing year by year to negligible amounts. And then … with one election… things drastically changed. We stopped our Treasury from taking in enough money to cover its known expenses and instead, borrowed the amount to fund what was necessary.

In eight years we went from a projected $5 trillion dollar surplus to an actual $10.4 trillion dollar deficit; a flip flop of $15 trillion dollars! Political afficiendos will be quick to blame Republican philosophy and their elected president: George W. Bush. Unfortunately they are way off the mark. (I say unfortunately for if one party and one president were truly the problem.. the fix would be much easier to amend…)

The problem is a systemic one. The entire financing system of the Federal government is now broken; almost to a point where returning to the glory days of before 2000, is barely considered a laughable alternative. The problem can be best ascribed to a head on collision between a poorly timed demographic shift, and unreal expectations. Put simply in one word, entitlements; put in four words, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare.

Here’s how paying off our nation’s trillion dollar debt benefits us.

Courtesy of Federal Budget 2009 (Right click for full image)

Looking at the image and being asked what can be cut under current law, one sees that only two areas of the above pie chart cover discretionary spending. The other four cover mandatory, non-discretionary items. That means that they get paid, … irregardless. We have no choice but to pay them fully. We have to pay interest. We have to pay Social Security. We have to pay Medicare and Medicaid, as well as all other mandatory payments such as Treasury obligations.

The only two areas where we can slice, dice, and cut back on expenses, are between that of national defense, and everything else we think of as being “our government”; both together amount to a paltry 38% our our entire expenditures. 62% of our Budget is locked down, and commitments have already been determined where it will be spent…. long before the fiscal year even begins.

So one sees that if we were to pay down the National debt, we free up the interest payments ( 9% of our current budget) which can then be applied to other things we might need ten years from now.

Obviously our entitlement programs will have to be changed. One can see that ridding ourselves of Medicare and Medicaid as a governmental expense would go a long way to reducing our deficit, and ultimately be a big push bringing our interest payment closer to zero…. But doing so… brings up the ugly social issue of what to do with those Americans lacking health care….

Contrary to popular belief getting rid of these programs is not completely impossible. Except for the time-frame covering the past 40 years, mankind has survived OK without Medicare and Medicaid. Rome lasted a thousand years without it. We all know that if we suddenly became faced with an all-out-war against some type of alien invader (Independence Day),what money was currently designated as a mandatory expense to cover health costs, would instantly be moved to supplement our planet’s defense with nary a whimper. Our sick would make due the best they could… perhaps even do better than they do now… (at least for those 2 million Americans a year who pick up a nosocomial infection!)

The writing is on the wall. One entitlement will have to fall in order to save this country. As America’s retirees get older, the medicare problem is one costly extravagance that must be looked at closely to determine whether it helps or hurts our nations viability.

When compounded with Social Security’s insolvency, the Medicare situation takes on an additional albatross around its neck. For as one thinks about it, we are using federal funds to extend the lives of those who are receiving Social Security. Using all and any expense available to keep someone resuscitated long enough to earn one more Social Security check, does not make practical or financial sense. We must rethink our commitment on how we will provide long term health care, based on today’s prices… not those prices existing back when the Great Society was envisioned….. the 1960s.

Ultimately for governmental medical assistance to survive, we will have to suck the profits out of health care. There will be a few who protest. But if Medicare were suddenly to cease to exist, and health care became a cash only commodity, somehow we would survive. Who knows? When faced with no free blood pressure medicine, we might try other methods to keep alive… such as eating right and exercise.

The amount of people dying will never change. Everyone born will die at some point. All we are doing, is removing the unlimited amount of taxpayer money used to support the unreasonable assertion,that we have the right to use lots of other people’s money to live as long as we selfishly can.

Think about this. Very few of us would purposefully bankrupt our own flesh and blood children by forcing them to pay out of pocket for our over-the-hill medical needs… With Medicare being fully funded by taxpayers….. it is doing just that…

Of course there is another method we can use to fund our budget and keep Medicaid and Medicare: bring in double the revenue…

But, because of the demographics of our aging population and the sparsity of those working young who are paying for the old people’s expenses, keeping this cancerous expense on-board, and paying for it by saddling those still working with double taxes, is not a viable option…. One could argue that it is morally wrong. It would be saying to our children that “yes, we had the American Dream freely given to us by our parents; now you will have to work much harder, and earn even less, just to continue that dream for us.”

The writing is on the wall… Sometime, somewhere in our future, it will have to go… Not disappear, mind you, but in its form now, funded as it is currently… it cannot last… The pie chart tells all. Tweaking 3 or 4 percent in any one category makes no dent upon our unfunded problem.. We must begin preparing ourselves for this uncompromising reality; one entitlement will have to go. Looking above we see the absence of Medicare and Medicaid in the Federal Budget, is more plausible than the loss of any other category.

If we were to wean ourselves away from that entitlement, and apply that amount in bulk towards our national debt as a payment of one half of one trillion per year, within 20 years…. our debt will be gone.

For when it comes down to discretionary spending… we are as low… as we can go… The cut has to come from Medicare/ Medicaid. What replaces it is a whole different discussion…..

So how high do taxes need to rise, (using today’s figures without cutting out one entitlement), if we truly wish to decrease our national debt? Since the economy grew significantly during the Clinton years when all taxes were higher, those rates we can be assured do not stifle economic growth. As a first step, that would be the smartest move; let the Bush tax cuts expire. …To those who argue that increased taxes constrain our economy, try and get a solid answer from them as to why the economy grew like magic when they were previously in place.

Since it has already once been done, it should not be hard to do it again. Right? Need more detail?

Let’s look at the twentieth century as a whole.. This chart simply shows the highest marginal tax rate per year. It ranges from 7% in 1913 up to 94% in 1944-45. Graphically displayed it looks like this….

Graph Courtesy of Truth and Politics.org

Although the graph stops at 2003, this evidence shows the ending level extends at 35% through to 2008.

If one couples one’s knowledge of history with numbers portrayed upon the graph, a correlating factor of 40% seems to be the ideal marginal tax rate.. When rates dip below that amount….they may last for a few years at that level, then they soar sky high for many years thereafter… It appears that languishing below 40% puts too much stress on the private sector. Something goes wrong, it buckles, and great governmental expense is taken to bring it back under control.

But if one uses the same evidence portrayed on the graph, and this time couples it with one’s knowledge of economics, they notice that lower rates produced boom economies, and the higher rates stifled economic growth.

Recent knowledge ( ie. today’s events) coming off of the experimenting and tinkering between 40 and 35 percent, leads one to believe that 35% is too low to sustain the economic viability of this country. As a nation we have socialized ourselves a bit too far to survive upon those lower rates…. 40% seems to be the optimum low that we can go….

Unfortunately because we played around with cutting underneath that magic number, we will be paying steep rates throughout the near future, very much like those which occurred between 1933 through 1963. Those who lived their full lives listening to Republican partisans constantly complaining about today’s high taxes… well, thanks to them (Republican partisans), America’s wealthy is about to find out just what “high taxes” really are…. As one can see from the chart, and can estimate from the amounts of the bailouts being currently given out…. the highest marginal tax rates for the wealthy, will climb higher than most of our wealthy has seen in their lifetime…

And because of that increase… our economy will slow.

The beauty within this chart is that it provides to all a sense of where the line needs to be drawn.. When we talk of raising taxes… we are speaking of returning to 40%, a level only 5% different from where we are now… What that means is … instead of someone making a full billion dollars now, after future taxes are deducted that person would be still sitting on $950,000,000 dollars… Who wants $950,000,000 dollars? I do. I certainly would not fold my business just because I had to give an additional 50 million over to my government, a scare tactic some may make us try to believe. Especially since I already know that our economy functions more consistently with that additional 5% amount financing the support structure on which all businesses depend on.

So how much revenue does that paltry 5% increase raise? Try $390 billion dollars per year, based on current data provided for this year’s third quarter.

True, that five percent does suck a little spending out of the economy, but if applied to the deficit, it reduces the amount borrowed which in turn lowers government’s cost. Eventually when interest payments reach zero, we can again fund our government on a pay as you go plan, thereby balancing taxes with costs in a fine equilibrium….

So if we hold costs the same. How long and how high do we raise taxes to bring our deficit to nothing in 11 years… 2020.

Debt —–Yr Expenses—Yr income—-Yearly incremental amount
10.4T——— 2.7T ————-2.6T ———————– 204 B

(The extra 100 Billion comes from above: it’s the yearly difference between current expenses and income multiplied by 10 for each year.)

So how much does that cost us? 204 Billion is what percentage of 2.6 Trillion? 7.8%

We need a yearly increase of just 7.8 percent to pull us out of debt in ten years, assuming we continue to spend as much as we do now, and that we continue to receive as much national income as we do now……..

That would make the highest marginal rate (35% + 7.8%) equal to 42.8%: just 2.8% higher than it was during the booming Clinton Presidency. Really…. is that not a lot of hardship to undertake?… Especially when one compares it what our predecessors, “the Greatest Generation” had to pay in order to give us the prosperous America which we inherited?……

And if that increase amount is spread across the entire spectrum of our sources of income.

Courtesy Federal Budget 2009 (Right Click for Full Image)

The actual cost to the top ranked taxpayers, could be less…. One would be well advised to realize that the stimulus packages perhaps costing up to 3 Trillion by the time politicians finish robbing our future, will extend these estimates considerably.

But seeing the numbers makes one realize that we are not at the end of financial stability…. The United States has vast resources at its disposal to throw towards the global economic meltdown, slowing and then stopping its progress. We need just a moderate revenue increase to make it happen as well as begin making plans for shedding responsibility for one of our hitherto guaranteed…. Federal entitlements.

The question is what is in it for us… Bottom line… a job.

Although distant and remote, the National Debt plays a huge role in our economy, just as do charges and credit card payments play a similar role in everyone’s household finance. Think of all the spending you personally would be free to do, if you owed no one any money and could pocket what you earned…. That same principal holds for our government as well.

Those of us who still have jobs today are worried. Those of us without… are worried even more. Our jobs and long term security, depend upon our Federal Government getting costs in line and living within their means as well…. As with any investment, paying out an additional 7.8 percent is affordable if one gets a payback of a higher return…

Those living in the 90’s saw it with their own eyes… Dropping the debt creates long term stability and that…. creates jobs.