• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000 • National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000
Got it?
OK, now let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
• Annual family income: $21,700 • Money family spent: $38,200 • New debt on credit card: $16,500 • Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710 • Total budget cuts: $385
I’ve seen the above posted on a number of sites recently. I think it’s valid to think of the budget in these terms.
Sure, there are differences, such as our government’s ability to legally launder money, but the basic principles of home finance do relate, and taking eight zeroes off helps make things imaginable.
Considering that there are approximately 300,000,000 Americans, around half of whom don’t pay income taxes, it isn’t even too far off for figuring your own percentage of the debt.
Gimmicks aren’t going to change this chart. You can tax the people to give out loans (more debt) to small businesses, but that is mostly zero-sum. You can tax the people to pay for unemployment to encourage the unemployed to spend money to stimulate demand for products and thus create jobs, but that is like buying your employer’s product on your credit card in order to keep them paying your paycheck; It gets you nowhere or worse. You can tax the rich dry and barely make a dent in that number.
Just like in your personal finance, if you want to gain wealth, you need to provide something that someone else needs. If we aren’t selling more to foreign nations than we are buying, we are losing.
This isn’t so much a supply or demand problem as it is a relative value problem. If we are going to be on the losing side of this equation, we need to be printing money rather than borrowing it. This may not be fair to the savers, but they will fail right along with the rest of us on the current course.
Printing money eventually devalues it. A devalued currency will make imports more expensive and exports more affordable, putting us to our rightful place in the market again.
I would also support an eye-for-an-eye tariff policy to prevent socialist nations from taking advantage of us. Until one or both of these things are instituted, our economy will continue to decline.
Even with those changes, we also need to reduce our spending on the military, foreign aid, micromanaging regulations, incarceration, social programs for non-citizens, and benefits for public employees.