Annual budget deficits must end, and the debt must be reduced

May 30, 2023

The National Debt is a monstrous cloud hanging over the United States. It is money owed that is not being repaid, but growing each year.

As of May 25, the National Debt stood at $31,800,000,000,000 ($31.8 trillion). That is a number so huge that it is difficult to understand.

The U.S. Census Bureau tells us that as of July 1, 2022 there were 333,287,557 U.S. citizens. That means that for each citizen — man, woman and child — there is about $94.00 of debt, and about $430.00 per person 18 years-old and older.

Having a National Debt is not new. Its history is a fascinating thing to study.

There was a National Debt when President George Washington, took office in 1789. It was slightly more than $71 million. And, it increased by 11 million during his term that ended in 1797. 

Most of our presidents have seen the Debt increase during their terms in office, although 12 had a decrease in the Debt when they left office: Thomas Jefferson in 1809; James Monroe in 1825; John Adams in 1829; Andrew Jackson in 1837; Millard Fillmore in 1853; Franklin Pierce in 1857; Andrew Johnson in 1869; Ulysses S. Grant in 1877; Rutherford B Hayes in 1881; Chester Arthur in 1885; Grover Cleveland in 1889; Benjamin Harrison in 1893; Warren Harding in 1923; and Calvin Coolidge in 1929. 

Two presidents saw no change. James Garfield was assassinated during his first term after only 200 days in office. And after only 31 days in office, William Henry Harrison died.

It has been more than 90 years since the Debt was lowered under Coolidge. The reduction was $5.4 trillion for a total Debt of $16.9 trillion, slightly more than half of today’s Debt.

Since then, every president — 16 of them — has seen an increase during their time in office.

While things that a president does can affect the Debt, sometimes things beyond his control cause an increase. Factors like wars, recessions and national crises can affect the Debt. A recent crisis was the Covid pandemic. Another was the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that led to spending that was not planned.

Also, because the U.S. fiscal year begins in October and ends the following September, and presidents take office on January 21, during most of a president’s first year in office, he is at the mercy of his predecessor’s budget.

The Debt Ceiling is the limit on borrowing that can be done, and Congress has control of it. It is part of a law (Title 31 USC, section 3101) that sets a legislative limit on the amount of national debt that can be incurred by the U.S. Treasury. 

When the debt ceiling is reached, as it often is, these days, the President and Congress must work toward an agreement on raising it. If they succeed, the government can borrow more money to meet its obligations. If not, a government shutdown occurs until an agreement is reached. The latter option is not really a viable one.

For the last nine decades the National Debt has continued to rise.  The smallest increases since Coolidge’s lowering of the Debt in 1929 are from three consecutive presidents who served from 1981 to 2001: Ronald Reagan at $1.86 trillion; George H.W. Bush at $1.55 trillion; and Bill Clinton at $1.4 trillion.

Since Clinton’s tenure, the next three presidents have seen larger increases: George W. Bush at $6.1 trillion; Barack Obama at $8.3 trillion, and Donald Trump at $8.2 trillion. Joseph Biden has seen the Debt increase by $2.5 trillion in his two-plus years in office.

In December of 2022, interest on the National Debt — which at that time was $31.4 trillion — was $210 billion, roughly 15 percent of total government spending for the year, according to Visual Capitalist online.

“The current revenue of the federal government is approximately $4.6 trillion while spending exceeds $6.0 trillion,” Forbes online reported in April. “Thus, the current budget deficit is over $1.4 trillion. It’s clear that members of Congress are spending like drunken sailors and like the Titanic, the U.S. is on a collision course with a financial iceberg.” 

The article goes on to say that high interest rates make this situation worse for the government to meet its financial obligations. Meanwhile, politicians seeking reelection prefer to keep spending.

The Republican-led House of Representatives passed a measure to raise the Debt Ceiling, but also to make significant spending cuts. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, and President Joe Biden have been meeting trying to reach an agreement.

Hopefully, by the time this column is published, an agreement will have been reached.

At some point, elected members of Congress and the President of the United States must recognize that this unconscionable spending must stop, and the country must trim down, and develop a budget that pays current obligations and begins to pay down this humongous debt.

Our country was designed to be small, efficient, and non-intrusive. A government that protects the freedoms of its people, would not intrude on their good lives, and would not grow into the gargantuan monstrosity it has become. That is what the government needs to again become.

Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ tax and spend dream is being whittled down

In the span of just eight months since January 20, President Joe Biden has given us the border crisis, the Afghanistan debacle, the issues with China and Russia and North Korea, a broken supply chain, ridiculously high gas prices, and staggering inflation throughout the economy. 

That works out to nearly one catastrophe for each month. Some are wondering if America will be able to survive another three-plus years of Biden rule.

If many of the desired elements in Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda are approved, the answer to that is: America will be moving even farther from the country our Founders designed.

Some of the things in that agenda are not legitimate roles for the government of a democratic republic that was founded on the principal of individual, God-given freedoms. They are wrong for a nation which was created by its individual states, and that gave themselves a degree of independence from the federal government. They are wrong for a nation with a government of limited authority.

Our system of government purposefully gave us the ability to follow our desires for how to make a good life for ourselves, and not be dependent upon the government to take care of us from cradle to grave.

If you want to ply a particular trade, participate in a particular profession, start a business, or work in some other way to build your life so that you support yourself and perhaps a family, or just live independently, go for it. You may succeed, or you may not. If not, you are free to try something else.

Eventually you may make a decent living, a pretty good living, or become wealthy. What you choose to do is up to you. It is not the government’s place to tell you what you can or cannot do, beyond some common-sense laws, or to take care of you if you decide you don’t want to try anymore. And in the case of some who have bad luck and are unable to support themselves, the most generous people in the world — the American people — will most likely help you when you need it.

Yes, it is true that through the decades our government has grown well beyond its desired size, costs far too much, goes well beyond its designed restrictions, and interferes in our lives more than it was designed to do. That is not good. But it can be corrected.

Instead, the left in America is working overtime, not at trying to make their individual lives better, but to make our government even larger, more expensive and more controlling.

Some of the things President Biden and the Democrats, who still hold tenuous control of the government, want to do are simply improper. Such things as paying for child care, “free” community college, $450 billion for government-run preschools, are not the proper role of our government.

Some other things, such as amnesty for more than 8 million illegals, complete with payments of $450,000 for some; doubling the size of the IRS to monitor bank accounts of citizens; and spending $3.5 billion for a “Civilian Climate Corps” of Climate Change activists, are not good for the country, or our freedoms.

As Congress struggles to get support to pass Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, the monstrous $3.5 trillion, 2,465-page tax and spend leftist dream is being whittled down. Even though it now spends less money and uses less paper, it is still way too expensive and much too heavy. And Biden’s tax and spend agenda is still a disaster.

One really goofy idea for funding some of the multi-trillion-dollar spending plan is a tax on the “unrealized capital gains” of anyone who makes more than $100 million a year, or whose worth is at least $1 billion. This idea is likely unconstitutional. But if not, it most certainly is an oxymoron. 

A capital gain is the profit you make when you sell an investment asset for more than you paid for it. If you buy an asset for $1,000 and sell it for $5,000, you would pay tax on the additional $4,000. But this weird tax idea would be applied to the increased value of the asset before it has been sold.

If the asset later lost some or all of its gain, would the government return the taxed amount? Nope. This concept beautifully illustrates the twisted understanding many liberals/socialists have for economics.  

The left is determined to transform our nation of maximum individual freedom and world-leading prosperity into a government-run nation like Cuba and Venezuela, and all the others that have failed.

And some of our citizens, who have never seen worse times than these pretty good times of the 21st century, do not understand how things have improved through time in America, and how good of a country they have been blessed to live in. They don’t understand that America’s poor are so much better off than those that live in the poorest nations. 

They are eager to see the left succeed, believing that socialism — and ultimately communism — will make things better for us. It won’t. Let’s hope this effort fails.

Biden’s “Building Back Better” is really “Biden Boldly Blunders”

President Joe Biden’s early days in office do not bode well for the next three-plus years.

Changes to successful illegal immigration measures have created a true border catastrophe. This is readily demonstrated by record-breaking numbers of illegal aliens entering the country. 

Some of those seeking asylum surrender to the Border Patrol; other illegals avoid capture when Border Patrol officers are moved from the border to tend to illegal aliens that overwhelm housing facilities, allowing illegals to stream into the country unimpeded.

Why not keep the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for those seeking asylum? That would reduce the number of people overloading holding facilities by temporarily returning the asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases are adjudicated. 

Some of those avoiding Border Patrol are criminals, gang members, drug dealers, and some are on the terrorist watch list. And, there are significant numbers of all illegals that test positive for the coronavirus. 

And the administration is considering a conditional cash transfer program to help address economic problems that encourage Central Americans to head north. A New York Post story said the administration is “considering sending cash payments to Central Americans in order to dissuade them from making the journey to the United States,” actually paying people not to come to the United States. Like that is going to work.

Illegal immigration is Biden’s most visible and dangerous calamity. So far. 

And then there is the idea of “packing” the Supreme Court.

Biden has said in the past that he is not a fan of Court packing, and called it “a bonehead idea.” Packing would involve adding activist justices to the Court who would apply their personal political and ideological philosophies to their legal rulings.

However, despite his not being a fan, Biden has appointed a commission of mostly liberals to look into various aspects of the Court, including adding justices and placing term limits on justices.

However, in addition to Biden, many other people oppose the idea of packing the Court, including former Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away last September, and current Associate Justice Steven Breyer.

During an interview on National Public Radio in 2019, liberal Justice Ginsburg made it clear that she opposed such proposals. "If anything would make the Court look partisan," she said, "it would be that — one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'" She added that it "was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court" in 1937.

In remarks prepared earlier this month for delivery at Harvard Law School, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said, in what ABC News termed a stark public warning, that "It is wrong to think of the Court as another political institution," he continued, "And it is doubly wrong to think of its members as junior league politicians."

Prior to being elected, Biden campaigned on repealing the tax cuts made by then-President Donald Trump as one of his highest priorities, if elected.

In order to defend tax increases, Democrats play down the effects of the Trump reductions in tax rates. The Washington Examiner noted last October that “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has dismissed any benefit to the middle class as ‘crumbs,’ while presidential candidate Joe Biden has said that $1.3 trillion of these tax cuts went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wage earners.”

The Washington Post fact-checker gave Biden’s claim that the middle class did not see a tax cut its highest rating of four Pinocchios for being factually deficient.

The Trump economic policy changes resulted in the unemployment rate dropping to a 50-year low 3.5 percent in 2019. And, median household income rose by $4,440 or 6.8 percent, which is the largest one-year wage growth in history. 

Taxpayers in Pennsylvania and Colorado earning between $50,000 and $100,000 saw their tax liability drop by over 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively, while households with incomes over $1 million saw their tax liability drop by just 3.1 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.

The Examiner also reported that the doubling of the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 not only reduced taxes for families, “but the number of households claiming the credit increased from 22 million to 36 million.”

When Trump cut tax rates, it helped generate an economic upswing and benefitted millions of not-wealthy families and individuals. 

Biden, however, wants to raise more than $2 trillion over 15 years by increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, the global minimum tax to 21 percent, and placing a 15 percent levy on book income for the largest corporations, and corporate inversion.

Will that money be used to pay down the enormous $28.1 trillion national debt? No, it will be used to support so-called infrastructure, most of which is not what is considered infrastructure, such as manufacturing, $300 billion; electric vehicles, $170 billion, et al. These are corporate subsidies, not infrastructure. 

Where will that additional tax money come from? Higher prices, lost jobs and other undesirable actions.

This is bad spending policy funded by bad tax policy.

Democrats’ move toward socialism isn’t sitting well with their base

Most would agree that since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States things have been crazier than they have ever been, or at least crazier than they have been in our memory.

The left regards Trump as whacko, even as their own policies push the boundaries of radicalism.

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even Hillary Clinton are still on scene, and they are joined with a cadre of faces new to the race for the Democrat nomination to oppose Trump, or if he is somehow taken out in the primary, or otherwise, whomever the Republicans put up in 2020.

Trump’s unconventional, non-politician, combative style has put off nearly everybody at some time (or always) and the inability of folks to get beyond their personal feelings surely has further gummed things up even more.

But somehow, all of this has emboldened and set free the most radical among the Democrats, who push socialist ideals as if they are actually reasonable.

“The Democrats have become socialists,” stated liberal columnist Dana Milbank back in September of 2017, less than a year after Trump took office.

“This became official, more or less … when [Bernie] Sanders rolled out his socialized health-care plan, Medicare for All, and he was supported by 16 of his Senate Democratic colleagues who signed on as co-sponsors, including the party's rising stars and potential presidential candidates in 2020: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand.”

You may have seen the news since then that all of those folks, and even more, have either declared their candidacy, or hinted at it.

Sen. Harris, the former California Attorney General, suggests doing away with private health insurance, replacing it with single-payer government healthcare.

She told CNN’s Jake Tapper that if people like their current health insurance, they would not be able to keep it. "Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care,” she said. “And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require," she told Tapper.

On its face, this actually sounds like a good move. But just ask many a military veteran how government healthcare has worked for them. And the idea that government healthcare would have less paperwork? Where does she think the mountains of existing paperwork had their origin?

But returning to Milbank’s 2017 column, he noted the dramatic shift since 2013, when “Sanders introduced similar legislation” and “he didn’t have a single co-sponsor.”

Democrats obviously believe this approach is their winning strategy, and perhaps even believe it makes sense. The current environment among Democrats has allowed the emergence of a 29-year-old whippersnapper named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to dislodge a long-time New York House member, and quickly rise to fame. So fast and so prominently, in fact, that the old guard was knocked off balance, if balance they ever had.

These folks generally advocate doing away with ICE, open borders, single-payer healthcare - Medicare for All, doing away with private health insurance, abortion up to and even after birth, removing requirements for a photo ID to vote, allowing illegals to vote, radical gun control, raising taxes, free college education, and the Green New Deal.

The latter is one of Cortez’ favored positions. Somehow, despite her wild ideas and silly answers to serious questions, she has garnered a good bit of influence, enough to attract the attention of party leaders in Congress.

And liberal gadfly Michael Moore thinks so much of her that he wants the Constitution amended so that she can run for president.

“It's too bad you have to be 35 to be president,” Moore said on MSNBC. “We put that in the constitution, the Founding Fathers, because people died at 38 or 40 back then. Y'know, we need to lower that. If that was lowered to 30 ...” Obviously, logic is not Moore’s strong point.

These Democrat ideas have gotten so radical that one liberal Democrat, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, raised the flag of caution. “We’ve got to have actionable, practical ideas,” he said. “And I worry — we can’t get into this election season with everybody trying to out-promise one another.”

One survey shows that McAuliffe’s concerns are backed up by data. Democrat and Democrat-leaning registered voters responded to a Pew Research Center survey that by a 53- to 40-percent margin, they want their party to move right, to a more moderate position.

The number of Democrats who view their ever-more-socialist party favorably has fallen from 53 percent last September to 49 percent this year, and 47 percent viewed the party in a negative way.

Interestingly, the survey showed that 58 percent of Republicans seek a more conservative party, while 38 percent seek a more moderate party.

An editorial in Investor’s Business Daily puts things nicely into perspective: ”Socialism is the most pernicious political system ever. Wherever it's been tried, it's led to mass misery, poverty, loss of rights, and even mass killing. Today, Venezuela, North Korea and Zimbabwe are notable examples. True American socialism wouldn't be any better.”

Amen to that.

The New Deal is long gone; let’s leave it to its place in history

Few people alive today experienced “The Great Depression,” that period brought on by the stock market crash of 1929 and made worse by the Dust Bowl of the 30s. It was a time of great misery for America, and much worse than what today is referred to as “The Great Recession” that followed the market’s steep downturn beginning in December 2007.

While the latter event was the longest recession since World War II, lasting until June 2009, and its severity notable, it was not comparable to the Depression from which it got its name.

In the 30s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the severe economic conditions with programs known as the New Deal. Those who lived through it may well regard FDR’s efforts in a positive light, as they “gave the country hope.”

But as is often the case, those memories do FDR more justice than he deserves. His program of high taxes and spending prolonged and deepened the misery. Though the country suffered longer and more severely, however, it did survive.

Democrats still entertain ideas similar to Roosevelt’s. In a nation created with specific limits on government’s size and power, a major political party does its best to increase government’s size and influence over its citizens.

A current proposal harkens back to the dark days of the 30s with a new “New Deal,” this one called the “Green New Deal,” combining the horrors of FDR’s missteps with the equal horrors of the manic climate change faction.

Typical of leftist/liberal prescriptions for a better world, this one touts and focuses on a set of desired results, but avoids paying any real attention to the enormous costs those desired results would create.

The Green New Deal is only a draft resolution at this point, but it proposes to do away with all fossil fuel use by 2030, just 10 years after its legislation is supposed to be completed.

The proponent of this measure is – surprise, surprise, surprise! – the newly elected Democrat Darling, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has raised the ire of her Democrat colleagues with her behavior, which pays little deference to the Party leadership, as she stumbles in and out of controversy.

Her methodology for this grand idea asks questions like “wouldn’t it be nice if,” or “shouldn’t we?” But it pays little attention to the answers to those questions, such as “at what cost” or “who will this hurt?”

On the subject of “wouldn’t it be nice,” the Green New Deal proposes making the nation run on only renewable forms of energy, as well as upgrading every residential and industrial building to improve comfort and safety.

And it goes further beyond the green aspects of our lives. It also proposes to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one. And we must establish additional measures, such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others that the select committee, which will be formed to flesh out the draft, deems appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism.

The cost of these pie-in-the-sky goals runs about 40 trillion dollars over the next 10 years, roughly double the current national debt.

Fossil fuels have weaknesses that make them undesirable. But renewable energy sources have weaknesses, too. Windmills kill birds at alarming rates, and large solar arrays also kill birds. You might expect these factors to upset green organizations that work to protect animals.

Solar panels only work when the sun is shining, and windmills only work when the wind blows. As it turns out, according to the Department of Energy, the most advanced wind turbines only reach their rated capacity roughly 42.5 percent of the time. And the most advanced, motorized solar panels achieve their rated capacity roughly 26 percent of the time.

Currently, fossil fuel backup systems turn on when wind and solar can’t work, but the plan is to stop using them. If we are to be prohibited from burning coal and natural gas, the other options are using more nuclear energy, which attracts strong opposition like that of fossil fuels, or store energy in batteries in humongous numbers.

Further, banning fossil fuels from all agricultural, manufacturing, and transportation uses would dramatically increase the cost of every product in the United States and make it difficult for American businesses to export products at reasonable prices.

This proposal, like so many liberal creations, sounds wonderful, but poses substantial problems.

What works best in such monumental transitions like this is a gradual evolution from the old to the new. That, however, is not part of the plan. The left/liberal method is not gradual evolution, but government force, as we saw in former President Barack Obama’s war on coal, with all the unemployment and extraneous human costs associated with that which were, unfortunately, not accompanied with any semblance of pity for the negatively affected thousands.

As science, technology and manufacturing processes evolve and improve, green energy will gradually and naturally replace burning fossil fuels for many of their uses. America already leads the world in carbon reduction. It should not punish its citizens further by implementing unnecessary and painful measures.