re: A Quick Way To Pay Down/Pay Off The $40 Trillion National Debt

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Discretionary spending really isn’t the problem

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20-30 years ago the might have been a solution (freezing discretionary spending)

Now it’s an ant bite on the butt hole of a mountain lion

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None of the suggestions in here would be enough because that money would just get funneled somewhere else.

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Hypothetically lets say it wasn't funneled elsewhere. Lets say a miracle happened and both parties came together and were willing to compromise. Where could we make cuts that would would make a difference. For example now as being Vet I am a big military guy. I think defense is very important. But I am not naive or locked into my position that I can't admit that there are huge waste in the military. How much of a dent could be made by cutting foreign aid?

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If you don’t understand what the problem is why even bother posting in a thread like this?

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There are a ton of problems but I can't read your fricking mind. Spit the frick out what you are insinuating.

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Our government steals from us.

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What if I were to tell you it's not the gov't, but the federal reserve that is stealing your money, printing it at a goal of a 3% decrease per year?

Taxes don't matter.
The value of your "money" does.

Do y'all know how this works?

The government issues bonds (t-bills) to print more money. Those are the debt. The Federal Reserve buys the majority of those bonds with money from its member institutions, i.e. banks. We have to keep our money in banks. Our money is used to buy the the debt.

The bond (debt) holder, The Federal Reserve, gets the interest and puts it back in the banks. We will continue to run a huge deficit and it will continue not to make a difference because we are mostly borrowing from ourselves to pay ourselves while "creating" more money in the process.

The only thing that can frick it up is a run on the banks. The system is designed to make that extremely difficult. Think about the "penalties" you pay if you take money out of your retirement accounts. But, if you wanted to do your part to make the house of cards fall down, try to withdraw all your money from a bank in cash.

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Hell, freeze discretionary spending at current levels for five years and let revenue catch up.

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100% this.

It’ll take a generation but it’s the only practical solution.

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The government issues bonds (t-bills) to print more money. Those are the debt.

The Federal Reserve buys the majority of those bonds with money from its member institutions, i.e. banks. We have to keep our money in banks. Our money is used to buy the the debt. The bond (debt) holder, The Federal Reserve, gets the interest and puts it back in the banks. We will continue to run a huge deficit and it will continue not to make a difference because we are mostly borrowing from ourselves to pay ourselves while "creating" more money in the process.

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The federal reserve only holds $4.5 trillion of the national debt. Your explanation only accounts for 10%

Most of the remaining $35 trillion is held by private entities/funds and local governments. We’re not simply “paying interest to ourselves”. The federal government is spending outside of the budget, borrowing from said entities to pay for it and using our tax dollars to pay the interest on that debt. To the tune of hundreds of billions per year.

If I were a dictator I could balance the budget in1 day.