It will take 1,962 years to pay off the US National Debt.
At some point in your life, you have thought about how you would run things if you were in charge. If you were the parent. If you were the teacher. If you were the principal of your school. And even if you were the President of the United States.
Small kids think in terms of substituting dessert for dinner at every meal. Teenagers and young adults, think in terms of solving world hunger and everybody living in peace singing Kum-ba-la. Middle aged people think more in terms of finances and protecting their families. And seniors think in terms of Rose Colored glasses, remember the good time and forgetting the bad. And the combination of all of those perfectives is what makes America, America.
It would be great if the President of the United States could just take our tax dollars, win playing a bunch of games of Jackpot Capital bonus, and the money supply would be unlimited. But money is limited, and the national debt is not just a number on a spreadsheet. It is actualy money, which the people who “hold the debt” are going to want their money paid. And the good times will end.
How much debt does the US Government have and who owns that debt?
Currently the US Government has $28.4 trillion dollars in debt. Of that $6.1 trillion is owned the US Government itself. The US Government borrowed money from social security, and eventually, when the seniors get older and start needing that money, that money has to be paid. $7.3 trillion is owned for by foreign countries. These are the foreign government that own US Debt:
- Japan – $1.31 trillion
- China – $1.07 trilion
- United Kingdom – $539 billion
- Ireland – $3.19 billion
- Luxemburg – $291 billion
- Cayman Islands – $250 billion
- Brazil – $248 billion
- Taiwan (China) – $242 billion
- France – $236 billion
- Hong Kong – 227 billion
Now if we combine China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (as China says that we should), China would now own $1.539 trillion. So the list above becomes …
- China – $1.539 trilion
- Japan – $1.31 trillion
So China holds the largest amount of foreign national debt.
Is China the enemy of the United States?
That would depend on who is asking the question. If you ask business people, they will tell no, because they want access to China’s 1.4 billion people.
But I have a problem with giving China $3.9 million dollars in aid is that if China has the money to lend to the US, why does the US need to give money to China? It is like borrowing money from your father to give your father a birthday present. Yes, it may “feel good”, but it makes no sense.
Plus a majority of factories are in China, and at any point and at any time, China could tell the US, sorry, but unless you pay back your money right now, we are no longer going to ship products to the United States (or any other part of the world).
China controls our money. China controls our industry. And now China is even trying to buy our farm land, so they can control our food.
Do you ever look at when China donates money to the United States. It is always done with strings attached, and many times, the people accepting the donations do not truly understand what those strings are.
How long would it take for the United States to pay off its national debt?
There is only one huge debt figure that I could find, and that is the debt that England paid to slave owners in order to buy the slaves freedom. For the record, none of that money actually went to the actual slaves. But anyways …
The British government also paid 20 million pounds – the equivalent of around 17 billion pounds today – to compensate slave owners for the lost capital associated with freeing slaves. This payout was a massive 40% of the government’s budget and required many bonds to slave owners to effectuate the law. This was done in 1834 and the debt was finally paid in full in 2015. That is 181 years.
In 2019, these were the figures:
- $3.42 trillion dollars in revenue (taxes collected)
- $6.552 trillion dollars in expenses
- Deficit of $3.132 trillion dollars.
That is 15.0% of GDP. 40% of $6.552 trillion dollars is $2.62 trillion dollars.
So by using England’s real life example, it would take the United States 181 years to pay off a debt of $2.62 trillion dollars, assuming no extra money is added to the debt. The current US Debt is $28.4 trillion dollars. $28.4 / $2.62 = 10.84.
So in order for the US to realistically pay of the United States debt, it would be 181 years times 10.84 = 1962 years. It would take 181 years to pay off China alone.
Step 1: Stop spending money the US does not have
The United States needs to stop creating a budget that is greater than the amount of tax money brought in. The numbers are so high, that nobody can truly understand them. They are just numbers on a piece of paper. Do you think the American people would agree to the budget if our government told the citizens the truth? That given the current budget, it would take 1,962 years to pay off the amount of debt that the our government has made us responsible for. Just because the US can pay its bill (paying off the interest), does not mean that the United States is acutally paying off its bills.
I do not know exacty how to change the budget to keep the government from spending less money than it brings in. The last President to actually balance the budget was President Clinton, and when he left office, President Bush introduced tax cuts, and balancing the budget went right out the window.
At the end of the day, there are items in the budget that every single citizen can agree or disagre with. So citizens have an attitude of why should I pay extra money in taxes for items in the budget that I never agreed to in the first place.
And when the disagreements have now entered into the area that all Americans cannot even agree on what the US National Anthem should be or the US Flag, how can we even begin to talk about paying back borrowed money or things that a majority of Americans never agreed to in the first place.
Step 2: One bill, one purpose
The government needs to stop these huge bills that include everything in one bill that nobody in their right mind could understand. We all know why the government does this. It is because if each item was separate bill, a lot of items would not get approved. Some of the items are pork and a majority of Americans do not support them.
Other items are needed, for example, including the cost of keeping the sides of the road clean is included in the infostructure budget. It is not directly a road, but it is in that area of expenses. It is like paying for the janetorial services at your company.
Does it directly affect selling your widgets? No. Does it indirectly affect selling your widgets? Yes. If your store looks gross, people are not going to visit your store, and then they are not going to buy your widgets.
Step 3: Dedicate a week to every state
Part of the reason why things get added to budget items that have nothing to do with the original purpose of a specific bill is that congress never focuses on the needs of each individual state.
Some things are local problems. And some things go beyond local levels. The concept that only locally collected income taxes should pay for local schools is a great concept in theory. The problem is that higher incomes communities collect higher taxes than lower income communities.
That is due to high incomes leads to paying higher costs for housing which leads to higher property taxes collected at the local level. This creates a disparity in the amount of funding allocated to local schools and everything else stems from there. If children do not get a solid foundation in education, everything else in life is affected.
Nobody wants to pay for the expenses for a community that they do not live in (and may or may not agree with how that community is running things locally). Everybody can agree that how an Amish community in Pennsylvannia runs their community is a lot different than how a community in San Francisco runs their community.
The people in San Francisco wants to live the way that they want to live, and the people in the Amish community in PA want to live the way that they live.
Both communities are part of America, and both communities are what makes America, America. If we did not have Amish farms in PA, we would not have food. If we did have the San Francisco ports, we would not have the abilty to bring goods in from China or other countries from that part of the world.
So we can all agree that if either community ceased to exist, a part of American life would cease to exist.
So let’s createe a week to focus on each state, including have a dinner (or lunch) with the President of the United States, to focus on the needs of that specific state (without including everything else in there).
The first step is to set the schedule. There is no simple way to setup the schedule The following is just one option based on the fact that larger states have a lot more representatives, so they have more discussion.
- Week 1: Alaska, D.C., Delaware, North Dakota
- Week 2: South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, Hawaii
- Week 3: Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire
- Week 4: Rhode Island, West Virginia, Nebraska
- Week 5: New Mexico, Arkasas,
- Week 6: Iowa, Kansas
- Week 7: Mississippi, Nevada
- Week 8: Utah, Connecticut
- Week 9: Oklahoma, Kentucky
- Week 10: Louisiana, Oregon
- Week 11: Alabama, South Carolina
- Week 12: Colorado
- Week 13: Maryland
- Week 14: Minnesota
- Week 15: Missouri
- Week 16: Wisconsin
- Week 17: Arizona
- Week 18: Indiana
- Week 19: Massachusettes
- Week 20: Tennessee
- Week 21: Washington
- Week 22: Virginia
- Week 23: New Jersey
- Week 24: Michigan
- Week 25: Georgia
- Week 26: North Carolina
- Week 27 and 28: Ohio
- Week 29 and 30: Illinios
- Week 31 and 32: Pennsylvania
- Week 33, 34, and 35: New York
- Week 36, 37, and 38: Florida
- Week 39, 40, and 41: Texas
- Week 42, 43, and 44: California
- Week 45: Puerto Rica, Vigin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa (protected regions)
- Week 46: Indian Reservations
- Week 47: Americans living abroad
- Week 48: Americans in prisons in the United States
- Week 49: Americans living on miliary bases
Step 4: Get rid of executive orders on both the nation and state level
In recent years, executive orders have been abused on both sides. When executive orders became, “If I can’t get something passed through congress, I will just create an executive order”, the United States ceased to a national that voted for the representatives and it became a dictatorship. Every president abused executive orders in some form or another.
James Madison did 1 executive order and Franklin Roosevelt did 3,728 executive orders.
- 0-50 executive orders: 17 presidents
- 50-100 executive orders: 4 presidents
- 100-200 exective orders: 6 presidents
- 200-300 exective orders: 5 presidents (Kennedy, Grant, Trump, Obama, Bush)
- 300-400 executive orders: 5 presidents (Carter, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton)
- 400-1000 executive orders: 5 president (Eisenhower, Harding, Taft, Truman)
- 1000+ executive orders: 4 presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Woodraw Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt)
I am not including Biden in any figures, because he has only been in office for 1 term.
Step 5: Term limits for people in Congress
How does a person who is in congress have an annual salary of $174,000, but yet retire as millionaires? Even the reprenstives that support communism and socialism and “the rich paying their fair share” seem to retire as millionaires.
- Nancy Pelosi: $120 million
- Obama: $70 million
- Bernie Sanders: $3 million
- Elizabeth Warren: $8 million
How do government workers, we are saying that everybody should be paid the same, get the same house, the same good, etc. How are they millionaires on a public service salary? In other words, it is not different than in Communist countries were the leaders get all of the good food, good housing, party-only driving lanes, but everybody else gets exactly the same apartment, transportation, food, and clothing.
Summary
I do not have all of the answers, but I think that these 5 ideas are a good place to start.
