On June 9,2017, Robert Schroder writes on Market Watch:
Fighting wars, big tax cuts and economic stimulus packages have all added to the debt burden
The U.S. is approaching $20 trillion in national debt — the nation is a cool $19.85 trillion in the red as of Monday — and when it crosses that mark, get ready for some finger pointing over who’s to blame.
If history shows anything, it’s that both parties share responsibility for boosting the debt. Fighting wars, big tax cuts and economic stimulus packages have all added to the burden over the years.
Here, we’ll take a look at some key moments in the debt’s trajectory until now, and also where it is going.
In August 1981, with the U.S. at the beginning of a recession, President Ronald Reagan signed major tax cuts into law. While Reagan’s supporters credit the cuts in tax rates with juicing the stock market and the U.S. economy, the downside was obvious: less money flowing into the government’s coffers. A U.S. Treasury paper shows the 1981 act reduced federal revenue by an average of $118 billion a year (in today’s dollars) during the first four years.
President George W. Bush also signed tax-cut packages into law in 2001 and 2003. Individual-income tax rates were cut, as were taxes on capital gains and dividends. This table shows where the Bush tax cuts fall in size compared to other major bills. President Barack Obama extended the cuts for two years in 2010, and made most of them permanent in 2012. Kathy Ruffing, a consultant to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates that the cuts originally enacted during the Bush years will account for $5 trillion of debt outstanding through fiscal 2017. That includes interest.
The U.S. spent heavily on the wars in Afghanistan — which the U.S. invaded after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — and Iraq. According to consultant Kathy Ruffing, the two wars account for about $2 trillion of the debt, including interest.
The year-and-a-half long Great Recession began in December 2007, brought on by the collapse of the U.S. housing market. The downturn spanned the Bush and Obama presidencies, and heralded the ballooning of budget deficits as the government responded with huge bank bailout and stimulus programs. In fiscal years 2009-2012, deficits exceeded $1 trillion.
With the U.S. still reeling from the Great Recession, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009. In addition to tax cuts, Obama’s stimulus bill spent billions of dollars on unemployment benefits and infrastructure projects. Obama said the plan would be “a major milestone on our road to recovery,” but Republicans trashed the measure as a waste of government money. Originally scored at $787 billion, the Congressional Budget Office in 2015 put its price tag higher, at $836 billion. Including interest payments, it added $1 trillion to the debt through fiscal 2016, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
CBOThe debt is projected to keep growing as the U.S. spends more on programs for its aging population. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if current laws remain the same — that is, if President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress were to do nothing — debt held by the public would rise to 150% of the total economy in 2047 from the 77% it’s at now. Trump has vowed a few polices that could have a big impact on the debt, including major tax cuts and a military buildup. What’s more, he pledged to leave programs including Medicare and Social Security unchanged. A tax plan Trump proposed during the campaign would add about $7.2 trillion to the debt over a decade, the Tax Policy Center estimated. The Congressional Budget Office is planning to release an analysis of Trump’s budget in mid-July.
The national debt is debt not associated with productive growth. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to low-wage countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.
Instead, the Federal Reserve needs to stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail,” Wall Street derivatives speculators, war and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to purposely acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
The CHA would process annually an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets.
The shares would be purchased using interest-free credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the added technology, renewable energy systems, manufacturing factories, rentable space for entrepreneurial endeavor and infrastructure, both repair and new, added to the economy.
Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
We need to lift ownership-concentrating Federal Reserve System credit barriers and other institutional barriers that have historically separated owners from non-owners and link tax and monetary reforms to the goal of expanded capital ownership. Removing barriers that inhibit or prevent ordinary people from purchasing capital that pays for itself out of its own future earnings is paramount as an actionable policy. This can be done under the existing legal powers of each of the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, and will not add to the already unsustainable debt of the Federal Government or raise taxes on ordinary taxpayers.
We need to free the system of dependency on Wall Street and the accumulated savings and money power of the rich and super-rich who control Wall Street. The Federal Reserve System has stifled the growth of America’s productive capacity through its monetary policy by monetizing public-sector growth and mounting federal deficits and “Wall Street” bailouts; by favoring speculation over investment; by shortchanging the capital credit needs of entrepreneurs, inventors, farmers, and workers; by increasing the dependency with usurious consumer credit; and by perpetuating unjust capital credit and ownership barriers between rich Americans and those without savings.
The Federal Reserve Bank should be used to provide interest-free capital credit (including only transaction and risk premiums) and monetize each capital formation transaction, determined by the same expertise that determines it today — management and banks — that each transaction is viably feasible so that there is virtually no risk in the Federal Reserve. The first layer of risk would be taken by the commercial credit insurers, backed by a new government corporation, the Capital Diffusion Reinsurance Corporation, through which the loans could be guaranteed. This entity would fulfill the government’s responsibility for the health and prosperity of the American economy.
Making EVERY citizen productive is the ONLY way that the real economy will grow along with incomes from both wages and dividends to repay the national debt and set our nation on a course of inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity and inclusive economic justice.
See my article “What Is Needed To Resolve The Destruction Of American Jobs Problem?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/593adb89e4b0b65670e569e9.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/.
