* The 2014-2015 senior student signature series features area senior class students – and their own “signature” outlooks on a topic of their choice. A new outlook will be posted on Cross-Counties Connect each Friday. The series opens with point of view comments by seniors from Mountain Lake Public High School. The opinions can be found by clicking on the Family & Faith link on the website’s header, and scrolling down to, and clicking on, Outlook. Their teachers are Brenda Feil, Kim Syverson and Debby Jass.
Diving Off a Financial Cliff
“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.” Those are the words of former President Ronald Reagan on the issue of national debt; however, he would have never expected those liabilities to rise to what they are today. To tell the truth, before researching for this paper, I knew the United States owed money to many different countries, but I had no idea that the debt was increasing yearly. I thought that Washington was chipping away at the debt a little at a time, just as my parents have been paying off the house and cars every month, slowly decreasing the amount owed to the bank. To understand the issue of national debt, I have researched the total amount of liabilities, the income available to pay off the debt, and a possible fix for the problem.
When I look at the total amount of money spent last year by the United States, about $800 billion, I feel overwhelmed and a little dismayed because of the vastness of the sum. In reality, this is just a small fraction of the total amount of national debt, which usdebtclock.org says is about $17,750,000,000,000 at the time of this writing. This amount is, in fact, a very large loan that has been used over the years for purposes such as roads, stimulus, and war.
In my opinion, loans are good tools as long as the person, or government in this case, has enough income to pay off the debt in a reasonable amount of time, but if the amount of the loan is allowed to get out of hand, the sum piles up like an ignored credit card bill. The national income this past year did not have the magnitude to fulfill just last year’s spending, much less chip away at the total number. Nationalpriorities.org states that the total revenue generated last year was over three trillion dollars; however, not all of this money went toward paying off debt. A good portion was used to fund federal organizations and the numerous salaries of our politicians. How can we reduce the amount owed if we spend more than we make?
As I think about this problem, a few possible solutions quickly pop into my head. The fix that seems most logical to me is to reduce spending as a nation by cutting a few government funded organizations that are nonessential in my opinion. Posey.house.gov gives a good example of unnecessary spending, stating that in 2012, $25 million was spent on furnishing rural libraries with wireless internet routers that had large user capacities, like those of colleges, even though smaller ones would have been sufficient. Another example found at the same website is that the government issued USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) workers tax-funded credit cards to use for personal items that cost the U.S. about $100 million in total government spending.
In conclusion, I believe the debt will not be reduced if steps are not taken to balance the scale of spending and income. The solutions are under our noses, but few politicians have stepped up to lead a change by making big decisions that may cost them their offices. In order to get elected again, they keep the programs and organizations that sometimes give their supporters special benefits. To move forward, I think that the tough decisions of what stays and what goes must be made, but the voters need to be on board with it as well. I encourage citizens to vote for the people who are willing to make necessary sacrifices to decrease the national deficit one dollar at a time.