“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
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Democrat Socialist plan will drive that past 200 trillion.
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What we also know that you are no conservative when your answer to everything is to raise taxes, and you actually agree with a line in the article that says that the lions share of tax breaks go to th
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That's why I consider conversations regarding this with people like you a waste of time. Trump has had 6 years, and you have 33 people in congress over the years that have been in 40 even over 50 yea
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The U.S. national debt has reached $40 trillion. Should you care?
Americans have gotten used to hearing big numbers from the federal government since the 1960s, when Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) supposedly uttered his famous quote, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
The currently circulating story is that blame for the federal budget deficit and consequently the national debt belongs to our “entitlements,” specifically Social Security and the public medical programs, perhaps because they are the largest budget expenditures — about $1.6 trillion on Social Security and $1.2 trillion on Medicare in 2025. The Associated Press, for instance, listed “defense costs, social programs like Social Security and Medicare and interest on the burgeoning deficit.”
Yet that addresses only one side of the federal ledger — the spending side. It ignores the revenue side, which has failed to keep up with spending. That’s because the most significant “achievements” of the George W. Bush and Trump presidencies were massive tax cuts, most of which flowed to corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Those cuts far outstripped the cost of the safety-net programs that have been shouldering most of the blame.
Start with the Bush cuts. These encompassed major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and smaller cuts in 2004, 2005 and 2006, reducing expected federal revenue by as much as $2.5 trillion over 10 years.
The principal beneficiaries of those cuts were the top 1%, who saw their after-tax income rise by 6.7% in 2010, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated in 2017. Those in the middle of the income range saw after-tax gains of less than 3%, and those in the bottom 20% saw gains of only about 1%.
Trump’s major fiscal policy move came in 2017, with a massive tax cut aimed, again, at corporations and the rich. The 2017 cuts cost as much as $1.5 trillion over 10 years by the reckoning of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a hive of conservative budget hawks.
But its cost was swamped by the tax cuts in the deceptively labeled “One Big Beautiful Budget Act” enacted by a Republican Congress and Trump last year. By the CRFB’s reckoning, that measure encompassed as much as $7.2 trillion in deficit-increasing provisions over 10 years, counterbalanced by only $2.5 billion in deficit-reducing provisions, for a net loss to the Treasury of $4.7 trillion over a decade. (Those figures include the cost of extending some of the tax cuts enacted in 2017.)
Put it all together, and new light gets shed on the federal debt. Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, estimates the left-leaning Center for American Progress, federal debt would amount to only about 60% of GDP this year, not the 100% estimated by budget hawks. More to the point, it would decline over time, reaching less than 48% by 2055.
The Bush and Trump tax cuts are only the most recent giveaways to the upper crust embedded in our tax structure. In general, “tax expenditures” — budget wonk talk for tax breaks — “disproportionately benefit higher-income filers,” in the words of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which was funded by the late eponymous donor, a hedge fund tycoon.
The top 20% of income earners, the foundation calculates, receive more than half the value of major tax expenditures, chiefly a preferential tax rate on capital gains and dividends (and the extinguishment of tax liabilities on assets held at death), and deductions for charitable contributions and mortgage interest.
In other words, America’s rich get the lion’s share of tax breaks and pass the cost on to everyone else.
As for the cost of America’s borrowing more generally, that has been rising even outside the growth in the debt load. That’s because the interest rate on Treasury securities has been rising: The government paid an average of 1.57% annually in interest on the $20 trillion in debt held by the public in 2016, but it’s now paying an average of 2.59% on its $40 trillion outstanding today.
What’s driving that increase? To a significant extent, it’s Trump. The cost of his Iran war and of his unpredictable and asinine tariff policies has forced interest rates higher. They are likely to keep rising, partly due to intensifying borrowing demand from AI startups.
Those secular pressures explain why the administration’s efforts to bring down rates have failed. Trump’s efforts to jawbone the Federal Reserve Board to lower rates have been falling on deaf ears — even his handpicked new Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh, mentioned at a recent investment gathering that rates may yet have to go higher to combat Trump-caused inflation.
That may explain why the attempt by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to bring rates down by stepping up purchases of Treasury securities failed miserably. Bond investors didn’t see Bessent’s effort as sustainable in the long term and in any event not big enough to move the needle on Treasury prices.
It’s true that there’s reason for all of us to be concerned about the size of America’s debt. Rising rates mean higher costs for home mortgages, car loans and credit card balances, increasing the strain on household budgets. But it doesn’t pay to be mistaken about what’s driving those costs. It’s not Social Security or Medicare. It’s ignorant and incompetent policymaking in the White House.
Los Angeles Times
Commentary: The U.S. national debt has reached $40 trilli...
what I know is that the 'real conservatives' here certainly don't care...