The Cause Of National Debt In The United States

The growing national deficit is a looming problem in the United States now more than ever. The national debt is constantly increasing and government spending is out of control. If these issues are not solved then they could spell disaster for the nation’s economy when the infamous debt ceiling is finally reached. Currently the national policy on the debt is to continue raising the debt limit until a solution is found that is agreeable between both parties in Congress. The two main issues of over spending and the constant raising of the debts ceiling by Congress can both be resolved by government spending reform, balancing the federal budget and initiating pro-growth policies in order to increase the government’s tax revenue.

This growth in national debt has blunt consequences on inflation, interest rates and growing economy. Foreign control of large amounts of government debt means that the taxes will have to be raised to repay debt and percentage owned to overseas governments which is not acceptable. Assuming that trade deficiency also exists it will lead to depreciation of dollar which effect its position as a reserve currency, and if during this process any new currency emerge as a replacement of reserve currency, higher interest rates will be required to sell the debt to foreign countries (Inflation). Raised interest rates have a negative impact on the economy and high accumulation of debts leads to high interest rates (Spending). Hence the economy suffers. This means that the funds for government programs like Social Security and Medicare are not enough (Economic Progress Under Obama). Another consequence of high national debt is the reduced flexibility in fiscal policy (Spending).

The U.S. national debt is currently $18 trillion dollars and it is rising fast. The national debt today is the highest the U.S. has ever seen. In George Washington’s Farewell Address, he declared the U.S. should avoid going into debt. If the nation end up in a deficit, that the debtors were responsible for paying off the debt so that it doesn’t burden the future generations. Like the rest of this advice in his Farewell Address, the nation ignored it. The ideal goal right now should be to stop the debt from increasing anymore because it is impossible to stop the debt from increasing and expect to pay it off in this generation.

Many Americans today are aware that the United States is in debt, however, some may not realize by how much. Currently, the United States National Debt is up to 18 trillion dollars and is steadily increasing. This is a serious problem for the U.S., especially for millennials, who are going to be the ones living and dealing with the debt left behind for them. Increased spending, borrowing from China, and interest on the money borrowed are setting up our economy for an eventual crash, one that the upcoming generation may not be prepared for. Every dollar that accumulates into the debt will have to be repaid with interest at some point, making it harder to pay back. To gain a better understanding of how the U.S. dug itself into such a deep hole, one should start at the beginning of where the debt started.

The federal budget is known as the notorious economic tank from which money is distributed to various programs. The money used every fiscal year, which begins October 1st and ends September 30th the next year, belongs to the people. The government raises this money through taxes and they spend it on national defense, Medicare, and social security. The federal budget is an exercise in making choices, and those options will certainly affect individuals living in the U.S. These choices cause debt to pile up on the government, who is struggling to make it disappear. The deficit and debt of a government gauges how well it is being run and how well it has been run in the past. According to The Economist the national debt is the total

We hear about the debt almost every day: news talks about it, politicians argue about it, even President Obama gives speeches on it. So what is the significance behind it? In this article I am going to explain briefly what the national debt is, how big it is, and what it has to do with us.

The total United States national debt is now over 19 trillion dollars and our Congressional leadership shows no signs of accomplishing any significant changes to make the situation better. That 19 trillion equates to almost $59,000 for every citizen of the United Sates. Sound financial practice is to not spend more money than you earn and borrow only for emergencies. It appears our Congress is incapable of adhering to sound financial practices as in the last fifty years there have only been five years when the U.S. recorded a budget surplus. Between 2009 and 2012 the U.S. added 5.5 trillion dollars to its national debt.

So what is the National debt? It is when government spends more than it collects in taxes. Then the government has to borough the difference by selling interest baring IOU such as US bonds. For example a Us bank buys a one hundred dollar US bond it gets to loan out ten times that amount so the bank not only gets back the one hundred dollars plus interest from the federal government it gets to loan out another thousand dollars it doesn’t have and charge additional interest. Therefor banks get to make money out of nowhere. Plus if you think about it, that is one of the reasons that the biggest buildings in any cities are bank building. Debates about defense spending are arguments about our defensive strategies. What you spend depends on what you want to do militarily, which depends in what creates security. “A more modest strategy of restraint starts with the observation that power tempts the United States to meddle in foreign troubles that we should avoid” (Friedman). But what does restrain mean? It means fighting that temptation of minding someone else’s businesses. The Congressional Budget Office and the Office

The United States of America has carried some amount of federal debt every year since the country was founded. From this empirical evidence, it can be said that debt itself is not damaging to an economy. After all, the country has had periods of rapid growth and economic booms while carrying different amounts of debt. It is also plain to see that a very large amount a debt, an amount that could not ever be eliminated without unreasonably inflating the dollar, could have devastating effects. The US dollar is a fiat currency, which holds value only when holders of the currency have confidence in the issuing institution, in this case the US government. In the event the government could not repay its debts, the value of the currency would drop as people lose confidence. The effects on the US economy, households, businesses, trading partners and foreign governments would be disastrous and widespread.

During presidential bids for the White House and Congressional deadlines for increasing the debt ceiling, huge debates break out as to the enormous amount of debt incurred by the federal government. Throughout our nation’s history, national debt at this magnitude is a new things. The accumulation of this amount of debt has its consequences, especially when the debt hits the nations GDP (Gross Domestic Product), or the revenue the nation takes in per year.

The US National debt approaches 20 trillion dollars, and no large measures are in place to slow its increase. Addressing the debt problem will require the American people to sacrifice either their money, or the promises that the government gave to them. The American people and their government must be responsible and address the debt problem now, before it becomes unmanageable in the future.

The national debt of the United Stated has long been a large source of controversy, especially given the last four years having had $1 trillion deficits consecutively. The United States national government has overspent and run a deficit for the last 45 of 50 years. The US national debt is quickly approaching $20 trillion, and the budget deficit is still very high.

The National Debt consists of the total debt accrued by local, state and federal. Public debt is essentially the federal debt, thus compiling the staggering number that already exists. The debt deficit to me is astonishing. Currently, the total public debt in the United States, as of December 16, 2015, is $18,788,138,221,346.49. This includes $13,600,726,418,253.26 debt held by the public and $5,187,411,803,093.23 by intergovernmental holdings (usgovermentdebt, 2015). High GPD is not anything new to the United States. The all-time high was 121.70 percent ($18827323.00) in 1946 and a record low of 31.70 ($253400.00) percent in 1974 (United States Government Debt to GDP, 2015). The way we are spending, and the debt we are accruing, it would

In recent years, that national debt is a fact of life. Based on the government statistic data, the U.S. debt has surpassed 100 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and “public debt may approach 190% of GDP by 2035” (Driver and Matthew 2). During the last 15 years we experienced a massive increase of the debt. There are several factors that lined up to cause this situation. One of the biggest issues is the overburdened Social Security system. Due to increasing number of retirees and longer life spans leading to more benefits payments, and decreasing

America's current fiscal policy is regarded as unsustainable because borrowing has both explicit and implicit costs associated with it. The explicit costs are the interest payments we make on the national debt. According to The Moment of Truth: Report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, we will pay $226 billion in net interest and projects that to rise to $938 billion by 2020. Also, if you add the interest payments over the next ten years, it amounts to a staggering $5.76 trillion dollars (2010). That is more than one-third of the present-day GDP and threatens to keep getting larger. This brings us to the implicit costs of uncontrolled borrowing to pay for our growing deficits. The $5.76 trillion we are projected to spend on debt interest is empty spending. It provides nothing to the nation's future and eliminates other possibilities that could have resulted in a positive return, such as: education, energy and technology. To make matters worse, more than 50% of the debt is not owned by Americans but by foreign lenders (Murphy, 2010). In other words, less than half of the interest payments are to American lenders who are likely to spend their gains domestically and strengthen the economy, another implicit cost.