Why is the national debt growing?

Question

The US has 14 trillion dollars. They can pay off the national debt in an instant, can't they? And why is it growing? Why does the government/ economy need loans when they have 14 trillion dollars (which is growing by about two trillion a year)?

Also, would you give three percent of your annual income to cure national debt? Curing national debt would be a vital step towards getting Americans to come together. I don't know if that's conservative or liberal. But I think it's important we come together and coming together economically will allow us to come together in other ways. It's getting to a point where that giving part of what we make is the only way to stop national debt. And if we all did that, it could be stopped in about 24 years or maybe even less. That would be nice.

Answer 1

Well we can't pay it off at one time.  That's quite a bit to spend...(9 trillion bucks, which is how much our debt is).  And one has to be careful while paying back debt because any amount we spend will add to our government expenditures and could cause a deficit (if we somehow reached a surplus...Or a bigger deficit if we stay in a deficit now).

We are spending way too much money now.  That is why our national debt is high.  One reason for this is because we spent so much on the Iraqi war.  Same for the Afghan war.  Another portion of why the national debt has went up is tax cuts.  Tax cuts to the rich haven't helped much and increased the deficit.  With more deficits, the national debt goes up.

Let me give background: National debt is made up of annual additions to the deficit.  So each time our deficit increases, the national debt goes up.

Not surprisningly, the national debt went up quite a lot during Bush's presidency and is still going up.

You see...under his Presidency's watch, he has had many deficits.  That has added a bunch to our national debt.

Yet with Clinton, national debt had actually not gone up much.  It did during the first few years of his leadership (because there were still deficits)...but it started to steady out due to his balanced budgets.  Thanks to the surpluses, national debt was actually starting to remain stable and steady.

And Clinton had a good plan too.  He wanted to begin paying it off.  He started doing so late in his administration, upon having a stable surplus.

Yet this became ruined by George Bush.  The deficit isn't all his fault..after all we kind of were in a situation where we had to go to war (Afghanistan).  The problem is, he did not have a good plan for war in Afghanistan.  So we ended up spending much more than we should have.  If we actually had a good strategy and worked with our army and other military leaders more, we could have made the area more peaceful and spend even less.  As for Iraq, same answer.  We could have had a good strategy, but we didn't, nor did we have a sufficient number of troops, which is why Iraq was a BIG mess for so long (its much better now but not all improved), and we spent so much.  Blah.  we should never have gone in there.

So large spending plays a big role in the debt being high (because it increased the deficit and therby increased our debt)>  Tax cuts did too.  They reduced taxes, especially for the wealthy.  So we lost much money (not that much revenue).  With high spending, there was never enough revenue to keep up with it.  (and that was a problem).  That wrecked havoc.  It made our deficits higher.  As a result, things wen't abd with the debt.  Our debt went up more.

So here we are now.  9 trillion dollar debt...and it will be hard to pay back.  We are still spending a lot of money for both wars.. Though there is hope now since we've made progress and some have talked about withdrawl!...But withdraw will HAVE to come careful..I actually think we should stabalize the country first (make it safe) because if we don't, Iraq will fall into the hands of the wrong people and cause it all to collapse.  (Then we'll have bigger problems).  We also need to evaluate our spending.  Cut down on it.  Raise taxes upon the rich.  Then GRADUALLY pay abck the debt.  It will take a LONG time. Its doable..Just going to take SO long...

Would I be willing to pay a tax to do so...maybe?  But the tax should go more on the wealthy.  They should take more of the burden.  The middle class has suffered.  So has the poor.  They don't need more taxes...just my philosophy.

Answer 2

Where does the US have 14 trillion dollars?  That amount is close to the entire U.S. GDP for a year.  I.e. if they raised the tax rate on everything to 100% for a year and the government spent nothing on anything, then they would have 14 trillion dollars.  Clearly the government can't work like that, which is the problem.

The government does take a percentage of your annual income already as taxes.  During the Clinton years, a portion *was* being applied to a national debt because between Clinton and the Republican Congress, they managed to lower spending to the point where there was tax revenue left over to apply to the debt.  Unfortunately, Bush and the later Republican congress failed to follow up on the new era of government fiscal responsibility and instead ran up a war, and gave a massive tax cut to put the system back into the red.

I think that in general fiscal responsibility should be a greater priority for a conservative government than a liberal one, and the fact that the concept has fallen so far from the forefront of national attention under Bush II is a demonstration of how non-conservative the current republican party actually is.