Posted on 04/22/2016 6:33:08 PM PDT by GIdget2004
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump this week walked back his assertion that he could eliminate the country's debt after two terms as president.
In an interview with Fortune Magazine published Friday, Trump was asked how his pledge to pay off the $19 trillion debt in 10 years was possible.  "No, I didn’t say 10 years," Trump responded. "First of all, with low interest rates, you can think in terms of refinancings, and get it down. I believe you can do certain things to pay off the debt more quickly. The most important thing is to make sure the economy stays strong. You can do it in smaller chunks. You can do it in larger chunks. And you can do it in refinancings."
Trump had, in fact, told The Washington Post editorial board earlier this month that he would pay off the debt in eight years by renegotiating trade deals. The Post called that claim "nonsensical."
His plan was also derided by budget hawks, who called it ridiculous.
Trump added in the Fortune interview that he now wants to pay off a "percentage" of it, but he hasn't decided what that figure would be.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
How much can Ford and Chevy go up if other people are permitted to compete against them without the protectionist regulations and laws their lobbyists created?
Given his proposals we'd be lucky if he didn't add 70% to what we have now.
How's that?
His tax plan has been estimated to add $10 trillion to the deficit. Trump will inherit a half-trillion dollar deficit. He will increase spending on infrastructure on the military and infrastructure and will make no changes to Social Security and Medicare. He has proposed no large scale cuts to offset the additional spending much less the current deficit or the loss in tax revenue. Given that then increasing the national debt by 70% is probably a conservative estimate.
By whom and did you mean debt instead of deficit. In addition, the craven Congress of rats and “principled conservatives” is unlikely to treat him with the consideration they treated the Mahdi in budget matters. He is, after all, white and eligible for vituperation.
Your original comment I replied to was:
The USA imports approximately $1.6Trillion per year. A 20% across the board import tariff eliminates the deficit tomorrow.
If wholesale prices drop, or people switch to buying from domestic manufacturers then the math doesn't work anymore.
So it won’t cause retail price increases, and it will actually be a hit to the foreign producers’ pockets and not American consumers. Either that, or they go out of business and American companies have to make our stuff again.
The original comment I had replied to was:
The USA imports approximately $1.6Trillion per year. A 20% across the board import tariff eliminates the deficit tomorrow.
As the value and/or amount of imported goods drops, so does the amount of money you're able to collect in tariffs, and then the math doesn't work any more.
even disregarding the side effects and drops in realizing taxes?
—
What drop?
Thank goodness for Ad Block Plus.
It’s Cruz saying on April 5 that anyone without a path to 1237 should drop out.
Getting the GDP up certainly will help; currently the debt is 108% of GDP.
That said, the current rates that debt is financed at is already artificially low. There’s very little room to refinance downward. More directly, the debt is so high that a return to historical norms for interest rates would increase the cost of annual debt servicing from the current levels to around $900 Billion a year. This is one of the many traps Obama (and the Reserve) have laid for whomever is the next President.
If the Fed doesn’t allow the near zero interest rates to increase substantially when the economy gets growing, inflation will shoot through the roof - and it is already understated now in certain core areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Man:_A_New_History_of_the_Great_Depression
When he said he could pay off the debt in eight years, he didn’t do the math.
Now, the deficit is larger, and the debt is so large and the economy so distorted that any upward interest rate would eat the growth in revenues and likely surpass it. Further, a significant part of current growth is artificially fed by funneling money into the economy that shutting off the faucet - which has to happen at some point - would cause serious disruption to the economy.
I haven’t dug back into the numbers, but a couple of years ago, it was $2.3T in fake money caused $300B in GDP growth. While that net hemorrhaging of $2T a year would likely lessen considerably, it would still be huge.
The USA imports approximately $1.6Trillion per year. A 20% across the board import tariff eliminates the deficit tomorrow
Yeah right! If you let the government collect it, they will squander it on more spending and we the people will only lose more freedoms and a bigger government with more dependency.
The Federal Government controls access, not necessarily constitutionally owns, more than 50% of land west of the Rocky mountains. To some extent this land was less desirable for a lack of water resources. Homesteading wasn’t feasible. Mining was found to be worthwhile in scattered sites. Grazing was worthwhile given large tracts available to compensate for sparse forage. Water would make this land more valuable.
Better use of the 700 million acres under Fed control would contribute to the GDP. Diverting excess solar and wind energy of the western states to desalination, could provide water resources to the arid western regions; and, allow better grid management. How we got the Fed land issue:
https://mises.org/blog/how-feds-got-all-western-land-and-why-its-problem
How about your bad manners in ignoring the obvious?
Sometimes even Jesus had to have bad manners to get a point across. He didn’t always channel Dale Carnegie to the hard headed.
Google “pre-crime”.
It began as a subject of science fiction satire, and ended up as serious study matter.
Jesus would say, of course, judge only as you ought to be judged yourself, not according to appearances.
Every time a pre-crime is prosecuted, grace is hurt. One assumes no crime until a crime is documented to a sufficiently good degree of certitude. The woman caught in alleged adultery benefited from this, incidentally.
It’s so easy to hate small evil a to measures so extreme that you completely open the door to large evil B.
It failed because it was another tax, that had no compensatory relief elsewhere, i.e. an overall higher tax burden. Not because there is something inherently evil about a tariff per se. Right now we don’t tax what comes in from China except when sold, and then the same as merchandise that was made in the USA under its own regulatory and income tax burdens.
For Donald to be able to use this as a stick for the carrot of free trade, makes eminent sense.
Say solar and wind and the left gets excited... and this is the problem.
Where’s the honest science? It already went out to lunch with no projected return time, with AGW a/k/a Anthropogenic Climate Change.
At root... I don’t think governments should be getting into some matters that are more suited for churches and synagogues. Let our states care about molestations and other gross wrongs. Let them even be suspicious about masquerades but never actually ban masquerades of themselves. Let smaller sins be something that highlights the need to be born again.
Consider that the Old Testament called for stoning of both Sabbath breakers and murderers — but in either case one had to have two witnesses. The scapegoat system was used for bloodshed cases with less testimony.
The point to retaliation was that it was saved for demonstrably notorious cases. Two witnesses. There are elements in this that our modern left would not like, and elements in this that our modern right would not like. But that’s because we have all been trying to make God over in our own image and then excusing the idol. He has His own distinctive ways.
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