Effects Of National Debt

Anthony Lombardi
Professor Kincaid
Research Essay
10 November 2013

How National Debt Affects your Wallet

In the times we live in today, National Debt can really put a dent in your wallet. “The national debt is the amount of money owed by the U.S. government to its creditors, which may include private individuals, corporations, banks, and other financial institutions as well as foreign governments” (Gale Encyclopedia). National debt is basically the result of the government spending more money than it takes in in revenue. This means that the larger the budget deficit is, the larger that the national debt will be (The Bancorp Bank). National debt has been in our country dating all the way backing to the mid 1700’s (Gale Encyclopedia).
This debt has to be paid somehow and the government gets us to pay them money in many ways such as higher interest rates, slower economic growth, higher taxes, higher inflation, and more (Adkins). They use these manipulations so they can utilize the money to slowly pay back the United States’ National Debt. The government is doing what you call “massive public spending”. This money is going towards construction of governmental funds like new roads, social security, government buildings, and a lot more. This has really led our country to not be able to economically expand at the rates that we should be. Everyone in this country really needs to realize what we are going through so our citizens can start to make better decisions from a voting standpoint. Our people are just too generous and vote on whomever without thinking about the long-term effects on the issues the politicians endure. National Debt keeps growing and growing and we keep paying all of this money to pay back the debt for a lot of things that we don’t even use. Anyone that earns an income and pays taxes are all contributing to the paying back of the government through spending. People need to
I got a chance to sit down with my father and he is highly opposed to our national debt. I asked my dad how he thinks he is affected by national debt and he simply answered, “Overall I have less money in my pocket due to the government taking money from me to pay for its debt through taxes” (Lombardi). My father has been paying taxes for thirty-eight years. I asked my dad when it started becoming more of an issue and he responded, “Starting in about 2011 the government really started to tax more because our country needed help paying back money because of so much government spending” (Lombardi). He talked a lot about how our government is in a lot of debt due to the military. He feels that if we never would have went into these “pointless” wars we wouldn’t be nearly in the debt that we are in now. The wars cost multi billions of dollars and rarely problems are solved. My dad said, “If we never had gone into wars we would not be nearly as far in debt as we are now and would most likely saved millions of dollars” (Lombardi). I also asked my father what he thinks the government should do so they don’t have to be taking out of our wallets so much. He responded, “I feel that the government needs to reduce spending and also stop focusing on things like welfare.” He feels as if things like welfare should not even be funded for because these people those are on there are mostly