“Our country is so far beyond bankrupt that I don’t know if anyone, including Trump can cut spending and raise taxes enough to save it...
Please look at the facts and tell me I’m wrong.”
You’re wrong. And “raising taxes” is the wrong way to do it anyway. Now, if by “raising taxes” you mean to increase the general revenue, fine. But usually “raising taxes” means the Government taking a bigger slice of the pie.
Instead, we need to make a bigger pie. But first, look at the context. America is still the richest, most prosperous, most innovative country on earth, and the U.S. Dollar is still the world’s reserve currency (at least by preference for now). U.S. businesses are worth about 61 trillion dollars out of 100 trillion worldwide market cap for all businesses everywhere. We are the second richest country in natural resources (after Russia), valued at around $45 trillion. We have more than $6 trillion in intellectual property and another $30 trillion or more in land value excluding the mineral rights and other natural resources, but there may be some overlap in these with our business market cap. We have the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world at $27 trillion.
The bottom line is, with our current national debt at $36 trillion, we are highly leveraged but not in the hole, so to speak. We CAN dig our way out of this massive debt. And the best way is to grow our GDP.
Our biggest problem is not financial. It is moral and spiritual. Without a moral compass, people are lazy, selfish, and corrupt. These things are like parasites on the economy and general wellbeing of our nation. But if we set aside this issue and look purely at the numbers, there is a clear path forward to making America, and Americans in general, prosperous.
Growing the pie bigger means creating wealth. We actually need to lower taxes in order to increase general revenues. This may seem counterintuitive, but lower taxes results in more investment back into business growth. Capital that is allocated to business growth is much more productive than capital handed over to the government as taxes.
Wealth is created three ways: work, innovation (such as inventions, and more efficient ways of working), and converting natural resources into work. In other words, work, work, work.
Money is how wealth is stored. A natural resource like gold is converted to wealth by mining it or extracting it from places like the ocean. In the ocean, it has no monetary value. But as gold bars in a vault or as jewelry or electronic components, it has value. Oil has no value if it sits in the ground (although it has potential value when it is discovered, this is only because it is possible to exploit it by extracting and refining it).
There is about to be an explosion of wealth-creating productivity as a result of AI and robotics. Books can be and have been written to explain this, and I’m not going to expand this post further by going into detail. I’ll just say that the cost of goods and services is going to go down drastically (when adjusted for inflation). Individuals can benefit from this not only as consumers but as workers or self-employed business owners by becoming exponentially more productive.
I wish what you say were true.
But we are very far fr9m balancing the budget, let alone decrease any outstanding debt.
$36 trillion at 10% is $3.6 trillion in interest.
$36 trillion at 5% is $1.8 trillion in interest
Or to look at it another way
Our total revenue from all sources in the fiscal year ending in 2024 was $4.92 trillion
Of that, 37% was Social Security and Medicare, or $1.82 trillion
$4.92 total revenue less $1.82 trillion in Social Security and Medicare taxes leaves $3.1 trillion in General fund revenue.
$3.1 trillion total general fund revenue divided by $36 trillion in debt is 8.6%. If interest rates hit 8.6% it takes 100% of our General Fund Revenue just to pay interest, with nothing left to run the government.
As of October 2024, the United States government has a monthly net interest rate of 3.3 percent on its debt, continuing an upward trend in interest rates that began at the beginning of 2022.
This amount or rate in net of any interest on the money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Funds.
Let’s look at this another way.
$36 trillion debt at 3.3% interest is $1.2 trillion net interest. If we have interest of $1.2 and total general fund revenue of $3.1 trillion, that leaves $1.9 trillion to run the government NOW. OUR DEFICIT LAST YEAR WAS $1.86 trillion. So we spent $1.86 plus $1.9 or $3.76 trillion in the general fund.
Elon and Ramaswami need some magic.
There is a saying in business. The best laid plans in the long term will fail if there is short term bankruptcy.