First of all, just to lay some groundwork, the reason Congress is debating Raising The Debt Ceiling even though all the expenses and obligations in question is not some future-to-be debt but rather are expenses and obligations ALREADY incurred, The Problem is–there’s not enough money currently in the U.S. Treasury to pay these bills.
Now you’d think that whenever Congress authorized some spending there would naturally be an automatic authorization to raise The Debt Ceiling to incur more Debt, should it ever be necessary, to cover any expenses and obligations already authorized by Congress BUT THERE ISN’T such an automatic authorization even though when Congress has specifically authorized expenses and obligations (such as Social Security) to be paid out but, instead, if the U.S. Treasury happens to run out of money, the Treasury would have to seek authorization from Congress to cover the bills.
As a matter of fact, The Treasury has had to seek authorization from Congress 78 times since 1964 and each time up until now Republicans and Democrats have both agreed to extend The Debt Ceiling. But we’re in a different political climate now (Trump strongly suggesting to The House Republicans in his CNN televised interview to not approve raising the debt ceiling—reasoning—Trump can claim this happened on Biden’s watch.)
Which brings us to the next point, every time The Debt Ceiling goes up so does Our National Debt. It’s now almost up to $32 Trillion. Before Trump came into Office, it was $22 Trillion and with all of Trump’s Corporate Tax Cuts (and the three (3) times Republicans AND DEMOCRATS UNANIMOUSLY approved Debt Ceiling Raises) when he left Office it was $28 Trillion. And now with The Pandemic, all the stimulus checks sent to “tide everyone over” through The Covid Crisis, Biden’s Infrastructure Plan to put people back to work, we’re now at $31.46 Trillion.
Which brings us to the next NEXT point—Why does The Debt keep freaking going up and UP?? That’s because (and nobody really discusses this and I watch ALL the cable economic news shows 24/7/365 times the last 14 years Bloomberg, CNBC, CNBCW, FBN (Fox Business News), CNN, MSNBC, PBS and what’s that?? The fact that—to properly take care of a modern society, it takes way more money and has gone up to a faster rate than our GNP has! Way faster exponentially faster! Think NORAD versus making cannon balls for Fort Ticonderoga! AIDS, Cancer and now Covid Research! Homeland Security, Space Exploration, Our Defense Budget, Social Security. Society and the possible harms that can come to it have dramatically increased compared to the increase in population, national wealth and productivity. This is a simple fact of life, to maintain and protect Society, it takes way more in technology and money to defend it and its citizens and way more to protect against diseases and other possible harms. Now here’s the good part, so does it for other countries. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Now taking all this into account, does it seem likely we’ll ever balance our Budget and reduce our National Debt to zero? I don’t think so and you know what I don’t even think that if we forgot about the 31.46 Trillion we’re in debt now and we “started from scratch” we could properly run THIS ECONOMY with a Balanced Budget but (and this is the “good” part) the same I believe applies to any other industrialized country.
Meaning as long as we did our best to control our spending and assuming other nations experience the same set of difficulties and problems, we should be OK and our Currency will continue to be the Reserve Currency of The World. Our big problem though will be China. As it stands now, Europe (France and Germany) conducts much trade and business with China as well as The Saudis.
