Posted on 04/03/2016 2:28:33 PM PDT by drewh
As president, Donald Trump would sell off $16 trillion worth of U.S. government assets in order to fulfill his pledge to eliminate the national debt in eight years, senior adviser with the campaign Barry Bennett said.
"The United States government owns more real estate than anybody else, more land than anybody else, more energy than anybody else," Bennett told Chris Jansing Sunday on MSNBC. "We can get rid of government buildings we're not using, we can extract the energy from government lands, we can do all kinds of things to extract value from the assets that we hold."
In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Trump said he would get rid of the $19 trillion national debt "over a period of eight years." The article noted that most economists would consider Trump's proposal impossible, as it could require slashing the annual federal budget by more than half.
However, when pressed on whether the United States could sell off $16 trillion worth of assets, Bennett responded affirmatively on Sunday.
"Oh, my goodness," he said. "Do you know how much land we have? You know how much oil is off shore? And in government lands? Easily."
The federal government's assets totaled $3.2 trillion as of September 2015, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. However, that does not include include stewardship assets or natural resources.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
The debt, the debt!
$20,000,000,000,000. ($20 Trillion)
You could go through a million dollars, spending $1000 a day for three years.
A billion would take you 3000 years.
A trillion would take 3 million years.
Well sure, Trump wants to sell the Hoover Damn and the Grand Canyon. Maybe the moon too.
I see comments very similar to yours coming out of Berkeley, CA. Looking sharp there.
See map, up-thread.
A lot of those federal employees belong to unions that would strike and REALLY shut down the government — nobody to send out SS checks, process Medicare forms, etc.
The hullabaloo would be horrible. We aren’t talking about a few thousand air traffic controllers like Reagan fired, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of federal workers that will stand together.
If it were me, I would relocate offices across the country to undesirable places like small towns in Alaska and transfer employees to the new office. When they quit rather than transfer, don’t hire anyone to replace them at the new office. You just need good reasons, like cost savings in a small town vs. DC, to prevent union cries that the purpose was to get rid of workers.
Won’t make money. You have to evict the filth, then renovate the facility to remove the stench and stains, THEN put it on the market. It would take exorcists from several relions to clean the spiritual filth from that place and I don’t think they could agree on any of it.
This has been dealt with.
Sell the Cadillac pay the debt. It can’t get any clearer than that.
Plus, you were shown how this would increase revenues and actually lower interest costs on bonds turned in for land.
So you would not have purchased the Louisiana Purchase or taken territory from Mexico. Smart.
Apparently you are unaware the there are National Parks the lands of which were GIVEN to the United States by private individuals.
Nothing in the constitution says that the feds can accept such donations so we should give the Great Smokey Mountains National Park BACK to the Rockefellers. Brilliant.
I don’t want the states to sell the land I want the federal government to do that IF this takes the form of a debt swap. That will guarantee the money goes to reduce the debt rather than sucked up by the Welfare State.
There is a difference between one Senator trying to get 65 other Senators to agree with you and being the President who directly controls the Treasury and Department of Interior. The big lesson from Obama’s presidency is that direct Executive power over the agencies allows dictatorial action that takes the Court system years to address.
The Federal government sells off property every day at IRS and Marshall auctions — property originally seized from citizens but is the property of the Feds when auctioned off.
Once the Federal land is sold into private hands, it will be pretty tough to take it back. An Eminent Domain fight would have to prove there was an overriding public use. With a separate court fight for each parcel I don’t see that happening.
Exactly right!
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about REAL money !”
One aspect of many.
Such as:
How is it not conservative to take land out of the hands of the feds and give it to private citizens?
I do not want foreign entities owning any real estate or property of any kind in the US. Many countries do not allow foreign entities to own buildings or land, and that is the right way imho.
I don’t want foreign governments or companies to own US forest land, water, gold mines or anything else! I think it’s a HORRIBLE idea.
That’s the idea. Btw, I like the base idea. Find a closed military base in some remote flea bitten area, and relocate 40,000 D.C. bureaucrats to work out of that venue. Rent out their former opulent offices in the D.C. kingdom to those who produce or create things.
Me too. Glad we agree.
I am glad he is finally getting on board with what Cruz started legislation to do three years ago. That's why I sent you the link to one of the articles discussing Cruz pushing the plan in congress and getting fought against by both parties. Now maybe Trump can offer some help persuading people to follow Cruz's plan.
I wish trump would have jumped in with support for Cruz when he shut down the government to keep the national debt from being allowed to rise. Cruz could have used the help. He was fighting almost entirely by himself against both parties, and the donors to those parties.
I get ya but we are way past that.
I like Sarah’s plan ... drill baby, drill!
Two of the three can easily be justified by national security considerations. There are powers implicit within the Constitution that allow/assist it to carry out specified powers. At the convention the issue of nailing the document down to specified powers was raised but it was roundly rejected and wisely too.
Hamilton’s interpretation of what is constitutional is the definitive one as laid out in the Essay on the National Bank, one of the most brilliant state papers ever written.
In it he says that something is constitutional if it has not been specifically forbidden, furthers the implementation of a specified power, or does not violate the spirit of the constitution.
Its legality is also implied by the concept of sovereignty.
Alaska was the fulfilment of the Manifest Destiny idea - whereby we should take over as much of the continent as possible. Three or four attempts on Canada had failed.
Btw our greatest jurist, John Marshall, said that when pondering any case before the Court the first thing he did was consult the Federalist, 60+% written by Hamilton.
Right, but the per capita share of the National Debt as per someone’s figure above is less than 70,000 each.
We don’t want it paid in cash but with US bonds.
Cash would be a huge injection into the money supply and inflationary.
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