Who Cares About The Deficit? Focus On The Debt!

You know, I really get frustrated with our so-called leaders when they ignore our problems. What I'm talking about is this new-found focus on the deficit.

Republicans have been talking about deficit-reduction for a while now. And after adamantly rejecting the notion, PresBo has finally decided to "reduce the deficit" by $4 trillion over 10 years. Of course, we'd still run a cumulative $6 trillion or so in deficits over that time, so a $4 trillion "reduction" is kind of academic, but...

Anyway, all of these people miss the point. Yes, the deficit is far too high, but we don't need to merely "reduce" the deficit. If all we do is make our yearly deficit smaller, then we are still accumulating debt, adding more layers of silt on top of an already massive mountain of national debt.

We don't need to REDUCE the deficit, we need to ELIMINATE it and turn it into a surplus. Look, we're in a hole right now, a very deep hole of our own making, and we need a solution to get us OUT of that hole. The Democrats sincerely want to ask for more people to come down with shovels so they can dig faster... I guess they're like the Dodo, claiming that by digging faster they'll eventually come out in China, and that's the way to get out of the hole. Republicans want to get us out of the hole by digging more slowly... a fallacy that should need no further explanation. What we need to do is STOP DIGGING. Then maybe we can start filling that hole back in.

Has anybody ever consulted a debt counselor? For those deep in credit card debt and wanting to get out, the FIRST piece of advice that a counselor will offer is to STOP USING YOUR CREDIT CARDS. Stop accumulating debt. Once you do that, then they'll tell you to establish a realistic budget that lets you live within your means. The United States Federal Government, and by that I mean Congress, needs to follow this advice.


We do NOT need to keep spending at current levels, and we CERTAINLY don't need to spend even MORE money that we don't have. And we really can't afford to wait almost 20 years to hit a balanced budget... especially since subsequent Congresses will certainly tinker with that plan, and we'd be unlikely to EVER see a blanced budget that way.

No, what we NEED to do is focus on debt ELIMINATION in a short period of time... say, one or two years.

By spreading out the "deficit reduction" over a period of decades, politicians try to make it easier on themselves, and leave most of the blame to those in office decades later. What they ignore is that those politicians won't want to get blamed, either, so they're unlikely to let the later-year austerity kick in as planned.

The ONLY way to make this work is to make the hard choices and reduce spending drastically TODAY. Now. Immediately. In the next budget year. Now, by how MUCH should we reduce spending? To answer that question, I'll ask you one. How high is the deficit?

We need to plan our next yearly budget so that we spend no more money than we expect to collect in taxes. No "except for the military or social security" exemptions. The entire budget must come in under... well, under budget. If we do not balance the budget in the near term, it will never happen. Multi-decade plans simply won't work as our politicians claim they will, because they ignore the reality that later politicans will change the plans.

It surely can't be any more painful to subtract $1.2 trillion in spending in a year or two than it was to ADD $1.2 trillion in spending over the same period.

Anybody who tells you different isn't really serious about tackling this problem.