And so speaks the ‘hush hush’. If the People, the TAXPAYERS, were told how in-the-hole they were; how their children and grand WILL be economic slaves, I’d wager we’d see another French’ish Revolution.
For the sake of this discussion, lets assume the national debt is $19T (we know they have over promised benefits far exceeding that total, so this is the immediate static number).
About 6.5T of that is owed to foreign countries. About 8T is owed to the “trust funds”-the cash was stolen and replaced with IOUs carrying a 2% forever coupon I believe. The rest is with the FED and private individuals and corporations at the prevailing coupon rate.
To me first order of business is put the trust funds on a cash basis, remove the coupon “cost” and abolish the “lock box” mentality. Debt goes down immediately to 11-12T plus the yearly paper exercise of paying interest out of the budget drops approximately 150B. If nothing else the “budget” then is actually representative of the true cash cost of running the federal beast.
After that, freeze all spending i.e. no increase for “inflation”. Do a budget with a guaranteed $100B of money to retire the foreign held debt. Of course it would take approximately 60 years to pay that portion off at this rate but if the interest market ever goes back to a normal level of 4-6%, we will get vaporized as the biggest item in the budget will be debt service. Hopefully the “normal” rates are not reached in 60 years.