(11-21-2024, 07:01 PM)Bchbunnie4 Wrote: Are we really complaining that it’s not enough??? Is the expectation that they get rid of the national debt and anything less is a failure???

Apologies for the rather lengthy answer, but I spent my whole career dealing with money, and I've had a couple of cups of coffee, so here goes my usual rant about the national debt.   

No, we can't get rid of the national debt.  What we have to do is make it sustainable.  Which means keep it from spiraling out of control to the point where the interest payments are so large that have to print money to pay the bond holders.  At which point we have hyperinflation and we are all much much poorer than we are now.  

The current federal debt is $35 trillion.  The annual federal budget is about $7 trillion.  Annual interest payments are about $1 trillion.  Annual deficits are approaching $2 trillion.  

Collect $5 trillion, spend $7 trillion, including a trillion just for interest payments.  Do that every year, and see what happens.  

We have to bend the curve.  The country won't go bankrupt, because we can print the money to pay the interest on the debt.  But that will put so much new money into the system that we will have inflation like Venezuela or Zimbabwe.  Or the Weimar Republic, where they took their money to the grocery store in a wheelbarrow and took their food home in their pocket. 

So in answer to your specific question, yes, I am complaining that it's not enough to say you're going to cut $500 billion from federal expenditures, and then say for example we will cut the CPB.  $300,000,000/$2,000,000,000,000 = .00015.

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