The US National Debt

The US government has a debt problem. That’s pretty clear.

The debt sat at $33,167,334,044,723 ($33 trillion) on 09/30/2023 and has increased by approximately 2 trillion dollars since. This raises the question of eliminating the deficit, that is the amount that the government has to borrow each year. There is generally only one solution proposed, increase taxes and decrease government spending. This has commonly been used as an excuse to gut the welfare state across various countries.

The difficulty is that cutting welfare and healthcare negatively impacts the economy and therefore tax income. Greece had to cut spending due to too much debt (yes I used Wikipedia as a source, but it’s the best general overview) and that had a significant negative impact on quality of life and their revenue which fixed literally nothing (their debt is still giant if not larger) and don’t even get me started on the horrible effects of Thatchers ‘Austerity’ and its descendants, which also had the goal of eliminating the deficit and, you guessed it, failed while making the UK a worse place to live with downstream effects even today.

Getting rid of the deficit isn’t just as easy as cutting spending or increasing taxes.

Not so fun fact: US military contractors commonly manage to get absolutely crazy profit margins (think 40-95%), effectively allowing the US government to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars (often using the excuse of foreign military aid) straight into the pockets of said contractors millionaire and billionaire shareholders who just so happen to not pay taxes because of loopholes. As long as the government keeps massively overpaying for privatized services while not taxing those that profit off those, there is no way to eliminate the deficit.