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.

Who cares? Is another country going to foreclose on the entire United States? Is it really a debt if you never have to pay it back?

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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.

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Here’s the reality: The parasites have to take less.

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That is Israel, Egypt, MIC, and every large corporation receiving corporate welfare, right? And reduce the Pentagon budget by the annual amount they can't account for. Must not have been important if they don't know where it went. And stop all foreign conflicts on behalf of the mult-national firms, creating the refugee crisis in Latin America and the Middle East.

Will save 1000x more than Jose getting to go to the hospital.

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Or just completely eliminate all foreign aid and cut every dept by 10%

Budget balanced

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Sounds good on paper, won't work.

"Entitlements" dominate the budget. They are 50-60%.

Foreign aid is <2% of the budget

So, you have to find money elsewhere.

- Push out illegals, they are a huge drain on services and cause medical rates to go up, which is a drain on medicare/medicaid

- Drive re-shoring of of the supply chain for all industries. In a three tier chain, that is 18% profit per step that is not taxed by the time you get to final product PLUS the worker's wages that are not taxed PLUS the capital investment in factories that would have also generated taxes during construction.

- Use tariffs to force the former, which in the short term generates revenues as it forces a long-term structural change that will be better for everyone.

Costs will rise (inflation) but wages will also rise as the labor pool tightens and more value-added manufacturing is done vs wages to dump frozen fries in the fryer. A lot of why we are where we are today is because of the rise of McJobs. Many older members here will remember when a restaurant was where you worked while looking for a real job or between real jobs, and most co-workers were teens.