Negotiate a Debt Settlement

How quickly could be feasable eliminate the national debt?

If we "temporariy" put a halt to every penny that we give to other countries, completly stopped all wasteful spending and put every nickle towards the 8+trillion debt - how quickly could we pay it down - and more importantly - WHY DONT WE??

Public Comments

1. What is the benefit gained on paying off the debt? So we can say we did it? Did you know most countries are in debt? So are most families actually. Is that a bad thing? Well, most families have mortgages, so it's either be in debt or be homeless. Which would you prefer? Their is no rush to pay off the debt, really. So long as it will be, it is of no concern. Paying it off won't make America better or stronger tomorrow necessarily, it would only create incentive to take on a new debt.
2. we don't because there are too many government employees on the collective teat. there are benefits that are not seen by the masses for the corrupt politicians like business deals and such.
3. If we evenly distributed the debt, most estimates place it at over $130,000 per person. Including children. That is over half a million per four person household. Don't forget to factor in inflation. It would help if the private bankers we owe weren't the same ones printing our money. The problem with bonds is that we have whole countries who use US bonds as a secondary currency. If the dollar continues to slide, and it will, those countries will dump all of our bonds. Look at China, they alone have more than a trillion dollars in bonds. Dumping bonds like that equalls a run on THE BANK. Our only hope I think is to introduce a secondary currency.
4. I am all for not having a large debt. But, since this is what we already have... First of all, the interest rate on the debt is rather low at 4-5%. If we subtract official inflation, the real interest is at 1-2%. Furthermore, if we subtract dollar devaluation rates for the last 5 years, we are actually making money by having debt because the bonds sold in 2000 are worth nearly 40% less if calculated in euros or gold. As long as dollar continues to slide, rushing to pay the debt down at the expense of economic stability would be a mistake.
5. There is no need to pay off all the debt. But, there is a need to get back on track of paying it down. The debt has more than doubled under GW Bush and that is bad, because GDP has not even come close to that rate. To pay off the debt fast we would have two options Severely cut government spending - 23% of which is the military, 36 percent which is grandma and grandpa's social security, 19 percent of which is other health and human services... The US government spends between 300-500 billion a year. At the highest estimates if you took that 500 billion a year and applied it to the Debt we are only paying off about 1/18 of the debt. (About the same amount as the interest on it). Next we would have to severly raise tax rates. lets say we doubled them. Now we would have about a 800 billion dollars or so to apply to national debt of 8-9 trillion. So, we are looking at 13 years or so to pay that off because of the interest and NO MORE BOROWING. Shutting down the government for 13 years - all aspects of it including aid to local government and the military... then it would be gone N O T W O R T H I T (there is solution B - we print all of our own money, so we could just print off enough cash to pay the debt, call all of our bonds and wire the money to the debt holders - but that would lead to a collapse of the USA dollar. It would be essentially worthless. It would be worth less than the Mexican Peso because it would be worth nothing - the holder of the note or bonds would know that US dollar has no real backing of the US government - its just monolopy money)....