In Reply to: Budget Deficits and the National Debt posted by SagoBob on August 06, 2025 at 09:35:50
Like any mortgage, the payments repay the debt and the debt eventually expires. Now, with a mortgage, you can also continually refinance and keep the debt alive forever. But you can eliminate the debt by simply making payments and not incurring any new debt.
So all you have to do is break even for a number of years, probably a lot of years.
Now, sure, you can speed things up by running a surplus. But that creates political pressure over "You're taking all our money!" And then they want tax cuts.
Then the problem with the break-even approach is that you have to sustain that for decades. It takes a bi-partisan commitment. Which is hard when the minions of one party kept getting taught the fantasy that "tax cuts pay for themselves".
And then you have to factor in that it would take years of narrowing the deficit to get to break-even. If you did it all in one year you'd probably trigger a recession. So you have to whittle at it. Which makes it hard for people to believe you're serious.
So from my perspective, it would require at least a decade of whittling to get to even, and probably four more decades of maintaining break-even budgets. It would require a lot of sacrifice from a lot of Americans who would never live to see the outcome. It all becomes a pretty tough, uphill path.
Or the statesmen in Washingtion, DC could just kick the can to the next generation of leadership.
Back in 1999, Bill Clinton actually had the government on a path to reduce our deficits and eventually retire our debt. All the nation had to do was stay the course.
But then George W. Bush got elected, and, like any Republican determined to run government like a business, settled in behind the CEO desk and did what any newly-hired CEO would do:
Declare that, Goddamit, the crippling problem in this corporation is that we take in too much money. The key to our profitability problem is to use every tool we have to scuttle our revenue!
Tax cuts followed, terminating for decades the prospect of running a government with balanced spending and income.