Preview

Faineant Fiscalism: The National Debt

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
978 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Faineant Fiscalism: The National Debt
Faineant Fiscalism At this moment, the national debt exceeds $18.8 trillion (U.S. Debt Clock). The national debt is the amount of money that the federal government owes to citizens, companies, and other governments. As time passes, this disaster will only worsen. The amount owed per person will skyrocket in the lives of the current youth generation. This issue is extremely imperative because if left alone, there will be economic conditions so horrible in the future that it will be detrimental to the prosperity of today’s youth generation. The national debt is maintained because of the budget deficit. Each year, the government creates a budget in an attempt to balance funds, and each year there are more expenses than revenue. A large amount …show more content…
Outrageous amounts of money are spent on healthcare reform. In the next ten years, Obamacare, a program that provides healthcare for all, is set to spend over $1.2 trillion (Federal Spending 1). This is more than double what is needed. Half of this should be cut and be used to start paying off the national debt. If this is done in one short term payment, the interest on the debt will shrink, saving a great deal of money every year. Similarly, Obamacare was a failure, less than half of expected users enrolled in the program. As a result, the program is ineffective and should lose funding. Political scientist George Will postulates that “...entitlements are the fastest growing personal income” (1). This proves that these programs should be cut. Many argue that this program is too beneficial to lose funding. This has been proven completely false as Obamacare initially had too few people sign up for the program to be effective (Will 1). In conclusion, healthcare programs should drastically lose funding. They are a major factor that leads to the growth of the national debt. If this program is cut, it will begin a period of economic success in the United …show more content…
These proposed plans would reduce the deficit by over $300 billion per year. This is not the final solution to America’s economic dilemma, but will create a chain reaction to reduce spending nationwide. If the national debt continues to grow at this rate, today’s teenagers will live to see the day where the United States is over $100 trillion in debt; something needs to change, and spending cuts are the only

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    The Value Added Tax and Targeted Budget Cuts as a Means to Reduce the Federal Deficit…

    • 2151 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In our hearts, we all know that the ONLY way to stop the growth in the federal debt is to stop spending more money than the government receives. Thus, me must reduce government spending AND increase taxes. The plan is as simple as that.…

    • 1050 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    $19.3 trillion dollars. That’s the national debt. And before I even say this number out loud it will probably have risen hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even millions. The U.S has about $66 trillion dollars in overall debt and even for the most powerful country that’s got to knock you down a notch. Indeed the next President has an abundance of problems to solve, but to even think about solving them he has to find money, which with -$66 trillion dollars on his belt is about as easy a trying to escape a house of mirrors. At some point people have to start wondering “ How did we get here?”.…

    • 868 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Fiscal cliff, a seemingly disturbing new term for American’s to digest about our growing deficit problems is stirring up panic and stress for our country’s economy. A lot of American’s are worried about the future of our country and how we can deal with our increasingly scary issue of debt. Even before the United States was founded in 1776, we have had a debt to be paid. It has grown in towering amounts since then and now is an issue we may never get out of. The debt crisis is a result of the US government not being able to pay its bills and the taxpayers not being willing to pay higher tax rates. This has led to a dependency on borrowing foreign countries money. This is a clear failure of control and management of our country’s leaders.…

    • 1019 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Secondly, another way to reduce debt is to completely cut out all the useless spending. In a year, the government spends $2.6 million dollars to help “Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job.” (reference) Why waste money on prostitutes? Why does the American government care enough to help them? We could be putting that $2.6 million towards out national debt. It’s not much but anything and everything will help. The…

    • 906 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    pop squad

    • 378 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Rising health-care costs are at the core of the United States ' long-term fiscal imbalance. Social Security costs, by comparison, are projected to increase from five percent of GDP to six percent over the same period. It is no exaggeration to say that the United States ' standing in the world depends on its success in constraining this health-care cost explosion; unless it does, the country will eventually face a severe fiscal crisis or a crippling…

    • 378 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    History has a way of repeating itself and the budget deficit and attempts to reduce it are no exception. The budget deficit is an annual amount that the federal government sets forth based on the amount of tax revenue it receives. When the amount spent goes over the amount received, you have a deficit. The United States government and the economy has gone in cycles when the budget deficit was not existent and there was a surplus and then to where there was an extreme deficit. In this paper we will discuss many scenarios over the years where Congress has taken actions to reduce the deficit and whether it was effective or not. We will…

    • 902 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The biggest issue that Affordable Care Act influence people is that it create unbalance between health care spending and income growth. Increased costs for individuals, families, and businesses, resumption of excessive health care spending and middle-class taxation will be much higher and will be a huge burden not only for the nation but also for each small parties. “In fact, for the past 40 years real, per capita health care spending has been growing at twice the rate of growth of real, per capita income. That’s not only true in the United States, however, it is about the average for the whole developed world.” (John Goodman 1) From the facts, health care spending is more and more of the family budget and it will be even worth in the near…

    • 672 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    economy, the world’s largest, has a GDP of $15.1 trillion, a small growth rate of 1.7 % and a yearly income of $48,387 per capita. The unemployment rate is hovering around 7.9% while the nation still attempts to recover fully from the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession. However, Under Democratic President Barack Obama, the federal system of government, designed to reserve significant powers to the state and local levels, has been strained by the national government’s rapid expansion. Spending at the national level rose to over 25 percent of GDP in 2010, and gross public debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP in 2011 (Heritage…

    • 3311 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Affordable Care Act Essay

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages

    America’s healthcare industry shows us one of the most revealing contradictions in the country’s economy. Even though America claims itself to be the world’s most advanced superpower, it is still unable to provide its entire population with healthcare. “Obamacare” is affordable for everyone based in their incomes, but there are still too many people without health insurance. The problem is that Democrats and Republicans do not compromise with each other to build on a good health care program, so that additional steps can be taken to moderate it. They do not want to accept the others’ ideas. When Obama came out with the Affordable Care Act program Republicans were not trying to work with him. For example, in the “Should the Affordable Care Act be…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In an election year, the average citizen is apt to hear a great deal of talk about income, taxes, spending, and more importantly budget deficits and the national debt. Given all of the talk, one may come to think that budget deficits and the national debt are one in the same. While the two do go hand-in-hand, it is important to understand that they are two separate things.…

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    With the 2012 Presidential Election getting closer, we are seeing candidates’ plans to solve our national debt of roughly 16 trillion dollars. With our country’s debt increasing by 4 billion dollars a day, we desperately need a miracle in the form of an effective debt reduction plan. With Obama struggling to fulfill this task, many people have been coming up with their own ways of solving this crisis. For, at this rate, my generations and the generations to come are being sold into “perpetual debt slavery!” At any rate, I believe that if we cut all department funding by 10%, cut corporate tax rates, and drastically cut all federal funding to entitlement programs we can begin to trim the debt. (topic #1)…

    • 582 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    National Debt

    • 1172 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The United States government faces mounting debts that crowd out private investing and cost the American tax payer $234 billion this year. The Congressional Budget Office expects the debt to grow to $1.7 trillion by the end of the year and increase as boomers begin to receive Social Security and Medicare1. While spending wisely through investments in capital raise the nation’s gross domestic product over and reduce unemployment, the practice of running deficits in all phases of the business cycles is problematic because it indicates a structural deficit caused by an inability or unwillingness of the American government to live within its means2,3. Economists to measure the national debt because it is an indicator of a nation’s ability to repay its debt use debt-to-GDP ratio, because it compares the amount owed to the amount that the nation produces per year. While the current debt-to GDP ratio is below the post World War II, it will soon grow drastically as Social Security and Medicare spending increases faster that the GDP4. The primary objective of American economic policy should be to grow the economy, increasing the government’s capacity to repay the debt. Unfortunately, the increasing deficits that entitlement spending requires creates a debt that is simply too large to grow completely out of. The GDP has grown sluggishly over the past decade from $9.76 trillion to $14.2 trillion, while the debt has skyrocketed from $5 trillion to $12 trillion5. The congressional budget office projects that the national debt to gross domestic product ratio will rise to 82% by 20196.The United States must curb wasteful entitlement spending, while maintaining programs likely to lead to economic growth. Responsible deficit spending can lead to a surplus as it did when Reagan’s military spending played an important role in ending the cold war, creating the peace dividend, as the defense budget was reduced due to the absence of the Soviet threat. While economists disagree on…

    • 1172 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    For as long as people can remember, the United States has been in debt. Every presidents have tried to reduce our country debt. Some presidents have brought the debt down while others have watch it rise. Many people here in America are starting to wonder whether or not our country will ever be economically stable, or continued to be further in debt. This essay is about the efforts that previous Congress member and presidents have done to reduce the budget deficit.…

    • 1210 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Starting with the current economic rate of growth, the government is currently nowhere near to achieving its objectives, as of right now the economy isn’t growing, actually the opposite. We are currently national debt because right now, government spending is much higher than income. One way that we could get out of this is by increasing tax, which is one kind of fiscal policy. This will increase income, so the government will have more money to spend and or use to repay their debts, but more importantly, it will allow the government to get back on track to a balanced growth.…

    • 422 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays