I have always tried to pay my debts, and so far I have always succeeded, eventually. That means trying to avoid debt when possible and to pay it off as soon as possible. On a personal level, I feel like I am the fiscal conservative that many people claim to be when they are talking about politics.
But I also recognize that my good fortune has so far outweighed my bad fortune. Sometimes bad things happen to people, and sometimes they are so bad you might never get out of debt. When that happens, a charitable society that cares about those in need should step up to help.
When you scale this up to include your whole nation, the amount of money involved is mind boggling. If you put the entire nation into debt, then there is a cost to all of us. Less of our tax money is available to us, because a chunk of it is being used to pay interest. Every single day a portion of our tax dollars is spent paying interest.
Ideally, we wouldn’t need to lose part of our tax dollars just to pay interest, and that would mean our tax dollars could better pay for services to our nation. As with an individual, taking on a temporary debt might sometimes be necessary, but taking on a permanent debt means siphoning off your resources forever.
Neither of our major political parties has managed to avoid adding debt since that one year during Clinton’s term as president. The Republicans routinely scream about debt when they are out of power, but they always add tons more debt every time they are in power.
There are plenty of smart people in our nation. I think we know how to stop doing this. The intelligence and the solution aren’t missing. It is the political will which is missing.
It is obvious that to get rid of our national debt the taxes paid need to exceed our expenditures for long enough to pay off the debt and then equal our expenditures when we have no debt.
Letting rich people and corporations avoid taxes immediately fucks that up. Spending $1 trillion on a military jet immediately fucks that up.
It is hard, because it is a nation, but the solution really is the same as when you are managing your household income. Try to avoid unnecessary debt. Pay off your debts as soon as you can.
And prioritize all of your expenditures.
That last part there is part of the problem with our country, though. We have politicians that prioritize spending our nation’s tax money on trillion dollar jets that don’t work correctly, and on giving trillion dollar tax cuts to billionaires and huge corporations. Etc.
We could prioritize our tax money to be spent on all Americans. We could charge people their fair share of taxes, rather than letting the rich and powerful buy our lawmakers.