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This piece (my guess) was written in no small part becuase of Trump's answers in a Post intervew a few weeks ago: Transcript: Donald Trump interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa where he said

DT: ...We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.
BW: How long would that take?
DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers . . . .
BW: What’s fairly quickly?
DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years.

At first I wanted to avoid saying Trump was spouting like an idiot but then I caught the fact he didn't say he would do it, or even that he should do it, but only that he could do it. I could too, just double everyone's taxes. No luck, later this came up:

BW: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?
DT: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.
BW: That would be $2 trillion a year.
DT: No, but I’m renegotiating all of our deals, Bob.

--which makes no sense at all because private trad 160415_INV_NationalDebt e is private money, not government money.

NP, w/ those of his followers that don't know the difference between the federal and the trade deficit.

However the big gap in the Post article (imho) is their lack of money/math savvy, that if we say every American owes $19,196,769,313,019.68 (from here) ÷ 318.9 million (from here) = $60,196.83, then we can also equally divide the total $128T in federal land, structures, bonds, oil rights, yada yada.

Then again, why bother. Total private wealth in the U.S. is over $86T so why worry about owing $60k if you got $272K in the bank?

One big fact everybody should know is that the Fed has been sweeping this debt under the rug so it has no market effect, much as they did with all the debt after WWII that eventually led to all the inflation we had in the 1970’s.

Never fear...update...

Trump walks back pledge to eliminate debt in a decade

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-walks-back-pledge-to-eliminate-debt-in-a-decade/article/2589333

Gabby Morrongiello @ Washington Examiner excerpt
4/22/16 4:10 PM

You have said you plan to pay off the country’s debt in 10 years. How is that possible?” a reporter for Fortune Magazine asked the Republican presidential front-runner in an interview published Friday.

“No, I didn’t say 10 years,” Trump said. He then suggested that instead of paying it all off, he would pay off an unspecified “percentage” of the national debt as president.

“It depends on how aggressive you want to be,” he said. “I’d rather not be so aggressive. Don’t forget: We have to rebuild the infrastructure of our country. We have to rebuild our military, which is being decimated by bad decisions. We have to do a lot of things.”

“We have to reduce our debt, and the best thing we have going now is that interest rates are so low that lots of good things can be done that aren’t being done, amazingly,” he said.

Trump also suggested that a big part of the answer to the debt is how it’s financed.

“First of all, with low interest rates, you can think in terms of refinancing, and get it down,” he said. “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.”

Thank you for referencing that article expat_panama. Please bear in mind that the following critique is directed at the article and not at you.

Speaking of the national debt, consider the following from a related thread ...

Once again, it’s time for "Federal Government Annual Budget 101,” the constitutionally limited power federal government's annual budget as the Founding States had intended for the budget to be understood.

Note that a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that Congress is prohibited from appropriating taxes in the name of state power issues, essentially any issue that Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers. This is evidenced by the excerpt below.

"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

In fact, based on the Court’s statement above, here is a rough estimate of how much taxpayers should be paying Congress annually to perform its Section 8-limited power duties.

Given that the plurality of clauses in Section 8 deal with defense, and given that the Department of Defense budget for 2015 was $500+ billion, I will generously round up the $500+ billion figure to $1 trillion (but probably much less) as the annual price tag of the federal government to the taxpayers.

In other words, the corrupt media, including Obama guard dog Fx Noise, should not be reporting multi-trillion dollar annual federal budgets without mentioning the Supreme Court’s clarification of Congress’s limited power to appropriate taxes in budget discussions.

Remember in November!

When patriots elect Trump, or whatever conservative they elect, they need to also elect a new, state sovereignty-respecting Congress that will work within its Section 8-limited powers to support the new president, including putting a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes.

Also consider that such a Congress would probably be willing to fire state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices.

I will refuse to pay it - only if they show my money goes to our military, our police and fire, our transporation, our schools, water, the basics. I will hide my money from them, and a lot of us are not so stupid not to know how. I hate the leftists in government, I will rebel. We will create our own money if we have to, our own cars, insurance pools, our own guns, et all, in our secret factories and garages. We will pool together.

OUR OWN “Enclaves”!

A lot of Conservative “Free Traders” tell us trade deficits don’t matter either. Birds of a feather.

The USA imports $2.7 Trillion of goods and services every year. A moderate 20% import tariff eliminates the deficit tomorrow.

Of course, the minute a republican gets back into the White House, the national debt will suddenly become a problem again.