The speech writer who prepared President Biden’s State of the Union address must have flunked math at school. Biden’s claim that “he was the only President to ever reduce the deficit by a trillion or more in a single year” had no merit.
In March 2021, there was the $2 trillion COVID Relief bill, December 2021 another $900 billion and $2 trillion more in March 2021. Most of these funds were borrowed and added to our long-term debt. Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill would cost another $2 trillion.
On a bipartisan basis, both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for our national debt growing from $4 trillion in 1992 to over $30 trillion in 2022. It is time to install a national debt clock with daily updates in both Congress and the White House. They can see daily how much they are adding to long-term debt every time they pass spending bills dependent upon borrowing to pay the tab.
Our national debt has reached $30.316 trillion and is on a path to grow by $1 trillion or more for years to come. Today’s tab averages $91.100 per citizen or $241.611 per taxpayer. (Source: March 14, 2022 National Debt Clock)
Who is going to bail out Uncle Sam to pay for this? Government, the private sector and citizens must make difficult financial decisions on how to use existing resources. Americans prioritize their own family budgets. They make the difficult choices in how existing household financial resources will be spent.
The world’s favored currency is our dollar. This could end if Washington will not control annual increases in spending and debt. If things continue the way they are, don’t be surprised if China surpasses us and the yen becomes the world’s favored currency. Our reign as the No. 1 superpower will come to an end like all empires.
Larry Penner
Great Neck
.
.
As with most fiscally illiterate Americans, the author does not understand the difference between “debt” and “deficit.”
The debt is merely the sum of expenditures that remain untaxed.
The deficit is the CURRENT relationship to expenditure in a given fiscal year That is what President Biden was referring to: federal receipts will have cut the DEFICIT by about a trillion I’d current trends hold.
To reduce the DEBT, you must first ELIMINATE the deficit. This gives you a SURPLUS for the current fiscal year.
Even if you have a SURPLUS within a fiscal year, you still can have DEBT, because it takes years of SURPLUS to completely whittle away the DEBT.
If the author, or anyone else is worried about the debt, all you need do is revert to the tax policy that existed prior to George Bush’s election. When that was in place, we had a SURPLUS and we stopped issuing 30 year paper.
Here endeth the lesson.