seneca wrote:
We were in a surplus, one that others would have used to fight the debt. Consider, if we rolled up our sleeves, agreed to pay taxes now instead of stiffing our futures and our childrens futures, we could accomplish a lot. Bringing down the debt would mean no more paying interest on it, which means we could afford to offer tax cuts to everyone in the future, not just a short squandering that benefits only the now.
Not technically true. We had a projected surplus. But yes an institutional debt strangles all of us. Right now it's $321 billion a year in interest we're squandering into nothingness. Compair that with some of our other programs:
DoD: $371 billion (It's like we have another entire country to protect!)
Environment: $29 billion (Glad to see we're spending enough on the Environment. I mean, we couldn't possibly use the other $300 billion we're wasting each year to clean up.)
Internations Affairs: $23.6 billion (You know the people who aren't at war with us? Yeah, this is what this is for. Israel, India, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia etc.)
General Science, Space and Technology: $22 billion (This is the one that pisses me off the most. We spend 15 times the amount of money we spend on this on nothing! Nothing!)
Postal Service: $65 million (And you wonder why stamps have gotten expensive all of the sudden, we have nearly 5000(!) postal services in debt interest)
Currently the interest on the national debt makes up 17% of our total budget. That's right 17%
For every dollar you pay in taxes 17 cents gets squandered because the past presidents cared more about their reelection than the country and made stupid budget decisions.
How long do you think it'll take before our debt gets so large that we aren't even able to pay interest on it anymore?
"Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
- Cheney
"When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain."
- Reagan
"Many of you have talked about the need to pay down our national debt. I listened, and I agree. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now... My plan pays down an unprecedented amount of our national debt."
- Bush
And the kicker:
"It [this new approach] will retire nearly $1 trillion in debt over the next four years. This will be the largest debt reduction ever achieved by any nation at any time. It achieves the maximum amount of debt reduction possible without payment of wasteful premiums. It will reduce the indebtedness of the United States, relative to our national income, to the lowest level since early in the 20th Century and to the lowest level of any of the largest industrial economies."
- Bush