Image courtesy of Jared Enos under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The national debt went up $82.7 billion last month. If you take out weekends and holidays, that’s an increase of more than $4 billion every day Washington was open for business in the month of February.
Five months into the government’s fiscal 2004, the national debt has so far gone up $308.7 billion. That’s an average of $61.7 billion per month. If this continues, we will close the fiscal year with a national debt increase, real deficit, of $741 billion, almost three-quarters of a trillion in one year and almost two hundred billion over last year’s deficit/rise of $555 billion.
Nobody but America’s taxpayers will pay off this debt and, if put entirely on the shoulders of today’s taxpayers, it would amount to more than $50,000 per person. There’s no point in trying to explain it in terms of the entire population since you cannot expect the population of children, the retired, and housewives with little or no income to come up with even half that amount. It will always be up to current taxpayers. Are you ready to cough up your share?
We owe all of this to things that have happened in the last 25 years or so:
Starting with the Carter administration, we’ve gone through three republican and two democratic administrations of borrowholics and I keep repeating—this is not a partisan subject. They all do it in one way or another.
If you think things would be any better under the democrats just because during the latter Clinton years the debt didn’t rise as much and was actually starting to turn around, then think again. In fiscal 2000, Clinton used $230 billion of our surplus income tax ($87 billion) retirement and other entitlement money ($143 billion) to pay down the national debt and it still wasn’t enough to keep the debt from rising $18 billion that year. It was a crooked debt laundering operation that would have made Marc Rich proud, but was probably suggested by Alan Greenscam.
There are two ways to get rid of the national debt in a relatively short time, but they will never be implemented by the current government or any of the candidates for office who don’t even mention the subject directly.
The first step would be to delete or otherwise obliterate the nonmarketable bonds in the Intragovernmental Holdings section of the debt. These “special obligation” bonds in phony trust funds are completely fraudulent and serve no purpose other to double tax American taxpayers. Eliminate the fraud that has been perpetrated for many years. This will not happen because it requires honesty from the crooks themselves.
The second step is more complicated and is an extension of an idea presented by Donald Trump when, in 1998, he entertained the idea of throwing his hat into the race for the presidency.
Mr. Trump claimed that he could eliminate the national debt with a one-time 14.25 percent tax levied against people making over $10 million a year. Once the debt is paid off, drop the tax.
Since the government has been stealing a portion of the American worker’s payroll taxes anyway, retirement and health care contributions, and no one has objected or objected strongly enough to put a stop to it—all we have to do is remove the $87,000 “cap” on payroll taxes. This means that everyone, the employed as well as the self-employed would be paying 15.3 percent of their annual earnings until the honest investor side of the national debt is gone. Would it change your taxes? Not if you’ve been below the cap every year.
Average Americans should not have guilt feelings about putting this load on the wealthy because everyone making less than the cap has been robbed for years and were the ones who contributed enough to bring the phony Social Security trust fund to more than $1.5 trillion or 22 percent of the national debt by itself. In other words, the American workers have already paid their dues and shouldn’t have any compunction about letting the wealthy feel the same pain for awhile. After all, a dollar lost by a homeless person is just as tragic as a thousand dollars lost by a millionaire. Pain is relative.
An advantage to doing this with payroll taxes is that there are no allowable tax deductions for payroll taxes. Everyone simply pays 15.3 percent of their gross earnings.
There’s even precedent for such action. Before 1913 and the advent of personal income tax, it was the wealthy who supported the government and took care of the expenses for its policies and activities.
Put it to a vote. There are more of us than there is of them.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”