Last week, I wrote about the need to reduce the United States’ federal deficit and the issue brought in a lot of great responses from our readers. I want to thank everyone who wrote in for their insightful comments. Many people thought of great solutions on how the U.S. government can reduce the national debt and several of the comments are printed below. If you haven’t shared your opinion yet, please do so by sending us an email or commenting below. Enjoy!
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Suggestions for reducing the National Debt
1. Take politics out of it! No more spending of borrowed money by Congress.
2. Balance the current budget by freezing all unmade expenditures immediately. No one can be paid, Congress, the Executive or Judicial branches of government, or Contractors, for a minimum of three months until the budget is balanced.
3. Reduce the size of the government bureaucracy by 50% and give every government organization six months to comply. The Department of Defense gets a special 90% reduction in its costs and requires a future referendum in order to raise its expenditures by $1 or more. Within six months, 50% of all other non-constitutionally mandated government functions, will be closed. Within 12 months, all governmental functions not mandated by the Constitution, will be closed and no further funding will be allowed. If citizens require, these services can be provided by NGOs.
4. Eliminate the Federal Reserve and replace it with a non-privatized independent organization.
5. Remove the Federal government as a third party to all private and other party dealings.
J.P.M.
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Elyse, here are some suggestions for generating additional tax revenue:
Let all of the Bush tax cuts expire; we had a surplus before he took office (uggh)
Tax all oil at the barrel (not the gallon) level when it is first produced or imported; since most of our oil is imported, this also helps the trade imbalance
Tax all toys when they are first produced or imported; since most of our toys are imported, this also helps the trade imbalance.
We should be able to come up with other ideas that get the job done (cars, consumer electronics, other products that are mostly imported).
I don’t think we can balance the federal budget unless we also balance the trade budget. We are off-shoring way too many jobs and importing way too much stuff. So, reduce consumption of mostly-imports and increase tax revenue.
Other subscribers will probably have great ideas to reduce spending; I wish them luck, because they never seem to actually happen.
M.T.
Redwood City, California
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Cut the deficit by 1) pull out of the United Nations and kick out the no goods and rent out the building. 2) Pull out all the United States forces that are protecting other nations and bring them home to close our borders. 3) Cut government payroll in half. Half are not working anyway. 4) Do away with the give-away programs to foreign governments. 5) Discontinue the NASA funding and sell all the scrap to China. This would put us back in the black.
N.M.
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Let’s cut foreign aid to a bare minimum, reduce all these subsidy programs, and take a hard look at the welfare program in the U.S. Too many able bodied people are on welfare.
C.C.
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How can we reduce the deficit:
1. Term limits without lifetime retirement benefits at our expense, even if you only serve one term.
2. A balanced budget law strictly enforced. If we don’t have it, they can’t spend it.
3. Strictly enforce immigration laws. What is it about the word illegal that they don’t get?
4. Welfare reform like the three strikes you’re out policy. It should never be a generational lifetime entitlement.
5. Tax breaks for the small businesses the provide jobs for 70% of our workers. Not more taxes and regulations that strangle innovation.
6. Stop funding the U.N. disproportionately more than the other members. Getting out altogether would be preferable.
7. Get out of the IMF and Kyoto treaties that will take us down a rocky road and ultimately hobble our ability to rebuild to new heights.
These suggestions would only be a start as I am sure others would have more to consider.
J.L.
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We have more weapons than the rest of the world combined by a wide margin, yet China could crush us as completely as if we unloaded every nuclear weapon in our arsenal by saying these seven words: “We will no longer buy your bonds.”
R.M.
Westlake, Ohio
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The only thing this country needs is EMPLOYERS!!! Employees spend paychecks, fuel the economy, live good lives, and Heaven forbid, sometimes save a little bit. But these people cannot exist without EMPLOYERS. This administration is causing companies to down-size, lay off personnel, and just back off and hunker down until this blows over. Problem is, what’s left after it does blow over?
Very concerned citizen,
D.E.C.
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A serious discussion of the national debt has to start with the fact that we can’t afford to continue to waste untold billions on the military in the name of fighting terror. We should bring our troops home within a year and aim to cut $200 billion a year from the annual defense budget. Then we should consider a tax on gasoline that is targeted strictly for deficit reduction. This would help fiscally and might even lead to less dependence on foreign oil. We should also pass an amendment making it illegal to run deficits in times of peace and prosperity. Recessions should be our only excuse for deficits after a 5-year transition period.
J.T.
Torrance, California
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Roy Nisja // Sep 5, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Interesting letters–some great ideas and some leaving a great deal to be desired.
I am highle in favor of dumping the United Nations–who needs enemys?
Stop the pork (and those who promote it)
Cut the spending, but not on the military.
Reduce the government payroll, including welfare. (Give them 2 or 3 years to get off of it.)
Something that most left off–Stop illegal immigration and deport all illegals. Also no fre stuff to illegals–school, hospitals and all free rides.
I could go on, but I’m probably classified in the terrorist category.
Oh yes, dump all the Washington crowd from the top down and start over under the Constitution. That ought to do it.
2 DEC // Sep 6, 2009 at 7:22 am
Reducing the deficit can only be accomplished by employees receiving a paycheck and buying products that require manufacturers to hire more employees that receive paychecks that will purchase more homes, autos, etc.
The only way to have more employees is to have more employers, and if you tax them as is now planned, such as letting the tax cuts expire, raising capital gains tax,raising corporate taxes, they will just keep their money in off-shore accounts and hunker down until people realize that capitalism does work, and it is the only system that does work. Extend the Bush tax cuts and give the manufacturing community some reason to invest. Create more employers. WE NEED MORE EMPLOYERS>
3 alan // Sep 6, 2009 at 8:05 pm
HOW TO REDUCE THE NATIONAL DEBT
People are making this much harder than need be, kind of like how little kids have to go through all kinds of contortions to explain “how Santa delivers all the presents in one night”.
The answer? Like the kiddies, they are trying to explain a myth. The myth is that the government (which actually OWNS EVERYTHING) would ever need to borrow ANYTHING. What’s been missing has been a commonsense definition of “government”:
Government: “one or more persons who claim natural resources, are willing and able to defend their claim on those resources, and make and enforce decisions regarding the allocation of those resources.”
You can only govern property that actually belongs to you. That a government can decide who goes to jail or is held against their will in military service, or must pay part of their wages in taxation, or loses their home to foreclosure, demonstrates that the ACTUAL owner of all of these “natural resources” is the government that can “make and enforce decisions regarding the allocation of those resources.” A government can delegate legal ownership any way it likes (some liked to do it by “market auction”, some by “to my banker buddies”, some by “the government will maintain – or, lately, obtain – ownership”), but any government can only delegate legal ownership of property that “in fact” belongs to itself.
So a government wouldn’t (and doesn’t) have to borrow (except possibly as needed for foreign exchange, an area that I won’t go into here), and yet the borrowing continues at greater and greater levels. What’s happening is that the ACTUAL owners of any government are the owners of ITS MONEY, in our case, that would be the private bankers who own the Federal Reserve System. The USA: Of the Bankers, By the Bankers, For the Bankers.
Before the enactment of the Currency Act of 1764 (which has been described as a principle cause of the revolution), the American colonies were able to create their own paper money by issuing “scrip”. After the Revolution, America was a monetary no-man’s-land, and so THE BANKING INDUSTRY (that had just finished putting down the 2nd American Revolution, more commonly known as “Shays Rebellion”) PACKED the Philadelphia Convention that was creating THEIR new constitution and made sure that state “scrip” was outlawed and a monopoly on the creation of money given to the federal government (where the bankers were pretty sure they could get their hands on it). After a few tries (with some success and some failure), in 1913, that’s exactly what they did.
When you are the owner of a government (as certain bankers currently are of the U.S. Federal Government) you make sure that that government, first and foremost, takes care of your needs, and obviously that has been the case in the current crisis (as it has been for many, many years). THAT is why the government borrows: in order to push along a process that puts a good chunk of everyone else’s labor (via the federal income tax) into the pockets of the rich who get PAID (in the form of interest on their U.S. Treasury bills basically for being rich. Quite the racket, and one that was thought up by (you’ll never guess)…….RICH PEOPLE! (as detailed in the book, “The Creature From Jekyll Island”)
A far more fair system would be to tax everyone a flat small percent of their wealth (in other words, on “benefits already received”), and that only to the degree that new money is put into the system (in order to maintain price stability). A system like that would actually give rich people incentive to encourage the government to hold the line on spending rather than get them to think up new and improved ways to get their hands on tax dollars. A one-half percent “infrastructure maintenance fee” on EVERY electronic debit transaction seems not unfair in order to GET RID OF THE IRS and every form of federal income-based taxation.
What’s putting people out of work is the “cybernetics phase” of the Industrial Revolution. Who really cares if companies are off-shoring mind-numbing call-desk jobs that would only pay $7.40 an hour if they were still here (not to mention that those jobs are all going to be automated themselves with a few years of this just-getting-started “Humongous Depression”)?
What we need to do (in order to end this Humongous Depression) is to take ownership of the government and get it to start taking care of OUR needs, first and foremost. The first thing to do is to replace the Federal Reserve money with OUR OWN money and pay “ourselves” that is, every legal U.S. resident) $1000 per month a piece compensation for the government’s impairment of our right to free access to land, a right whose denial has resulted in many years of wage slavery for millions of people, and, without which, any so-called “right to life” is meaningless. That flat-out takes care of the majority of need for any social security programs, and we should also end all corporate welfare and farm subsidies also: there will be enough money floating around that no such welfare programs will be needed. So it gets us plenty of jobs and no more homeless vets, and way less crime and people here illegally start going home to get the same treatment at home from their governments (because every other country will have to come up with the same deal or face revolution), only we want them to stay because they will work cheaper than impairment-compensated legal residents thereafter will (so we’ll have to do something about that). And so on.
(The National debt will get paid off during the process of replacing the Fed money with our new money, details will need to be worked out, but the debt is the least of our problems and anyway should be considered “odious debt” – and actually owed by the previous owners of the government, so, not to worry.)
A lot of people seem to have a problem with this plan (”Oh, you can’t do THAT!”, which I believe is the same thing they said to Alexander the Great when he outlined his “Gordian Knot” solution) just like children at first can’t begin to comprehend how their parents could actually be putting all those presents under the Christmas tree (not to mention the YEARS of bald-faced lies), but, as THE MAN said, “Time makes more Converts than Reason.” (”THE MAN” being Tom Paine, of course.)
What it will come down to is “no other alternative will have been found to work or even help very much”…you’ll see. The only real alternative will be a “New Dark Ages” for a Balkanized world where everyone is constantly fighting over every square foot of land and sea (as they are currently doing up in Maine, begging the government to exercise ownership and delegate property).
A government that WE owned and that kept its nose out of our butts actually might not be that bad.
You’ll see.
alan jacquemotte (you can read more on my http://www.classmates.com profile page)
ps. about the current healthcare hoo-ha, insurance is the root of all bad service. Better we should increase healthcare supply by training our kids to save lives rather than go overseas and commit war crimes (just the act of invading a country that hasn’t attacked you first is a war crime – per the Kellogg-Briand Pact – so anything actually done in a country that hadn’t attack your country first – like shooting or blowing up people – would obviously also be criminal).
Once this plan gets implemented world-wide, it will be pretty unlikely many people will try to “rock the boat” again, or get much audience if they do, so, instead of a U.S. Military force, we just might want to have a “U.S. Medical Force”. Cuba has 4 times as many healthcare professionals per capita as we do and medical care down there is dirt cheap (which is why the AMA keeps a clamp on medical education in the U.S.).
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