Deficit spending hits all time highs - and interest spending with it
Buried in this little gem is the fact that spending on the debt is now the fourth largest single line item on the budget - only slightly behind defense spending. This should terrify anyone who believes in basic economics and it should shame every Republican (including the President) who signed it.
This is a literally ticking time-bomb. It's just ticking up - not down so the actual explosion part is a little harder to react to.
This is a literally ticking time-bomb. It's just ticking up - not down so the actual explosion part is a little harder to react to.
Previous comments... You are currently on page 3.
The 2020s Will Be the Decade of Deficit Doomsday: https://reason.com/2020/01/10/in-the-...
This is a looming problem that we won't address until it becomes a mini-crisis. People on this site were saying it would become a major crisis back when the deficit was 450B. Now it's almost 1T, so assuming it wasn't just politics, I can only imagine how dire they see it now.
It's easy to fix, but almost impossible to find the political will to fix it before a mini-crisis occurs. I was happy it was an issue in last night's debate, but I take it with a grain of salt b/c whichever party is out of power has an incentive to focus on the deficit because it's undermines the spending agenda of the party in power. Maybe we need a solid Democratic president and a solid Republican majority in Congress who wants to undermine the president's agenda, like in the 90s when they balanced the budget.
I agree that politically it's difficult to find a solution, but mathematically it's very simple. It's just like how it would be mathematically simple for me to exercise just a few calories more than I take in.
Modest spending cuts, tax increases and spending growth cuts would solve it. Or we could just freeze all spending increases. As GDP grows, tax receipts grow, and the deficit shrinks. We should be doing some modest combination of these right now while the economy is strong.