“President Bush put in tax rate cuts. This boosted the economy and tax revenue is up. So it wasn’t a “tax cut”, because tax revenue increased. It was a tax rate cut and it worked perfectly.” (http://www.federalbudget.com) So just increasing taxes doesn’t necessarily help—in fact it could actually hurt. Cutting spending is the only solution. There are a few major areas of government spending, which are far ahead of the rest (according to http://www.federalbudget.com). Those areas are Defense, Health and Human Services, Treasury (mostly the interest on the debt that we’ve been talking about), and Social Security. Defense is surely the first place we ought to look, because as mentioned we ought to be able to provide quite adequate defense for our country while spending a lot less.
No one wants to cut Health and Human Services or Social Security. The amount owed to these programs is going to keep increasing if they aren’t adjusted at all, and they will outpace our ability to pay for them. Some different fixes have been suggested, the best of which ought to keep the payouts at a manageable level while only adjusting services provided minimally.
We need to much closer to a balanced budget most of the time, and start paying down the debt, rather than continually adding significantly to it. It’s not that we can’t have any national debt, or the deficit spending is always a problem, it’s just that it’s gotten out of hand and that if unchecked it could lead to significant problems if not disaster.
