Can the 8.5 trillion dollar deficit brought about in the past 6 years be paid off?

Question

Without raising taxes?

I meant the National Debt. Sorry.

Were talking 1.6 billion per day !
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Answer 1

No, but money is now an illusion. There is not enough gold in Fort Knox to cover the value of our dollar, which by the way, is really only worth about four cents! The Federal Reserve controls the economy but who controls the Federal Reserve? It is a joke, but with tensions running high throughout the world, I doubt we will have the last laugh. These are very scary times...

Answer 2

8.5 isn't that the national debt? That is deferent then the budget Deficit. The budget deficit can be paid off by improving the economy, there by increasing tax rev

Answer 3

I think all you young people better start paying attention and vote to change things. Its really not looking very good right now. More of the same is not going to cut it.
Shiraz, you never stop amazing me.

Answer 4

No, of course not. I don't think that can be paid of for the next couple of hundred years!

Answer 5

i mean bush is only makin it worse with his so called war , hes gonna drag us all down wtih him if he ain't stopped

Answer 6

GET IT RIGHT THAT IS NOT THE DEFICIT. STOP THE LIES

IF Woody Allen was right that 90 per cent of life is just showing up, then Bill Clinton has a stellar fiscal record. The federal budget deficit has tumbled from $255 billion in 1993 to a projected $117 billion this year. And Clinton was there when it happened. But that just about covers the extent of his involvement. For evidence of this, let's review the Clinton record over the past three and a half years:

-- In February 1993 President Clinton announces his new Administration's first economic program: a $16-billion "fiscal stimulus." The spending package is later abandoned by the Democratic Congress as too fiscally irresponsible.

-- In February 1993 President Clinton wins passage of his $250-billion tax hike -- which New York Sen. Pat Moynihan accurately describes as "the largest tax increase in world history." It passes both houses of Congress without a single Republican vote. The package contains approximately $2 of new spending for every $1 of new taxes.

-- In September 1993 the Clinton White House lobbies to defeat the bi-partisan Penny - Kasich deficit-reduction bill, which would have cut federal spending and the deficit by $90 billion over five years.

-- In January 1994 Bill and Hillary Clinton unveil "ClintonCare." The proposed hostile federal takeover of one-seventh of the U.S. economy would add at least $75 billion to the deficit over the next six years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

-- In September 1994 the President furiously lobbies liberal Democrats in Congress to oppose a Balanced Budget Amendment -- a measure supported by 75 per cent of the American public. Labor Secretary Robert Reich is a little too honest when he confirms most Americans' suspicions about this Administration: "The President is against simply balancing the budget."

-- In October 1994 the President signs into law his $30-billion "crime bill." The Los Angeles Times describes the legislation as a "once-in-a-lifetime federal spending bonanza" containing "a vast array of new social programs" including federally funded exotic-dance classes, sensitivity-training courses, and midnight-basketball leagues. The cost of the Clinton bill has to be shaved after the Democratic House of Representatives rejects the original version as too expensive.

-- In January 1995 Bill Clinton submits a 1996 budget plan that calls for $12 trillion of spending over the next seven years and $200-billion deficits for as far as the eye can see. Even Washington Post reporter David Broder blasts the document as a "symbol of Clinton's failed leadership." Because of the debt Clinton is adding, writes Broder, "the annual net interest is projected to climb from $198 billion in 1993 to $270 billion in 1997 -- when it will, for the first time, be larger than the projected defense budget."

-- In March 1995 Clinton again helps torpedo the Balanced Budget Amendment -- this time by strong-arming five Democratic senators, who had campaigned as champions of the amendment -- to flip-flop and vote no.

-- In June 1995, under pressure from the GOP Congress, Bill Clinton submits a new, revised budget proposal. It still doesn't balance the budget by 2002.

-- In July 1995 the Clinton White House begins its successful "Medi-scare" strategy to undermine public support for a GOP plan to rein in stampeding Medicare costs. Even the Washington Post editorializes that the Clinton Administration has become a gang of "medagogues." On Medicare and Medicaid, the White House is "engaged in an irresponsible campaign based on distortion and fear."

-- In October 1995 Bill Clinton confirms what most of the public is already painfully aware of: "I raised your taxes too much."

-- In December 1995 Bill Clinton vetoes the historic balanced-budget legislation enacted by the Republican Congress --listing 82 reasons why it cuts too much spending. He complains of cuts in everything from foreign aid to corporate welfare.

-- Later that month Bill Clinton releases his unprecedented third and then fourth budget proposals of the year. But they still don't balance the budget.

-- In February 1996 Bill Clinton releases a $1.65-trillion 1997 budget that calls for $360 billion in added spending, or $3,100 per American household, over the next seven years. Then with a straight face he tells the nation that "the era of big government is over." Oh, and the proposal still doesn't balance the budget by 2002.

-- In April 1996 Clinton signs the GOP budget after the Republicans capitulate to his demands and add back some $10 billion of deficit spending.

WHEW! This really is a pillar of fiscal integrity we have in the White House. The point of this demoralizing three-and-a-half-year budget odyssey is this: The Clinton Administration cannot credibly claim credit for the reduction in the deficit unless the nation is suffering from a severe case of fiscal amnesia.

On at least three separate occasions in 1993 and 1994 -- the fiscal-stimulus package, ClintonCare, and the crime bill -- the Administration attempted to make the deficit situation worse, but amazingly was constrained by a Democratic Congress. On four other instances, bipartisan deficit-reduction initiatives were rebuked by Clinton.

Since the Republicans took control of Congress in November of 1994, Clinton's fiscal obstructionism and demagoguery has been elevated to Olympic levels. The Republicans' budget-balancing plan was thrashed almost daily by the White House as "mean-spirited," "radical," "harmful to children, the poor, and the environment," and "just plain wrong for America." Yet in typical Clinton fashion, one day the budget is denounced as "wrong for America," the next day the White House is staging a Rose Garden press conference claiming credit for the impressive first-year deficit reduction that the "mean-spirited" Republican budget produced.

So how much of the credit for the impressive drop in the deficit this year does the Administration deserve? The standard spin from the White House these days is that the "enormous progress" on the deficit vindicates the Clinton "$500-billion deficit-reduction" package of 1993. It turns out we can roughly calculate how much of the deficit decline is attributable to Clinton, and how much to Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress. Back in April 1995, just before the Republicans released their seven-year balanced-budget plan, the CBO announced that Clinton's deficit-reduction plan would produce $211 billion of red ink in 1996.

Instead, the deficit will fall to $117 billion. That's a $94-billion improvement -- almost entirely attributable to the GOP budget. Over the entire seven-year budget window, the Gingrich plan chops a shade over $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) of deficit spending from the Clintonomics baseline.

The budget deficit would be lower still had it not been for Bill Clinton's vetoes of Republican Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and appropriations bills. Those vetoes canceled an estimated $10 to $15 billion in budget cuts for 1996 -- savings that would have been magnified in future years.

GOP partisans can hardly exult in the deficit story of the past five years, however. Despite this Administration's sorry record of fiscal obstructionism, there is still the unarguable underlying fact that Bill Clinton's overall fiscal performance has been far superior to that of his predecessor, George Bush.

All the deficit reduction of the last three years is simply recovering the lost ground of the early 1990s -- Richard Darman's reign of fiscal terror. It is a popular myth that George Bush inherited a budget crisis "baked in the cake" from Ronald Reagan. When Reagan left the White House in January 1989, the deficit was $150 billion and forecast to decline gradually till it reached $110 billion in 1995. The CBO concluded that continued deficit reduction would occur if Bush (and Darman) simply left fiscal policy on automatic pilot.

Instead, we got Bush's infamous reversal on "no new taxes" and a 1990 budget package that dealt a body blow to an already ailing economy and sent the deficit into the stratosphere. From 1990 to 1995 the national debt soared $622 billion above the levels anticipated in 1989. Richard Darman's enduring legacy to the nation is this: 1990 - 94 was the worst five-year deficit performance since World War II. Now really, how hard has it been for Clinton to improve on that rotten fiscal record?

The Left is now again busy trying to rewrite history to suggest that the Bush 1990 and the Clinton 1993 tax hikes contributed mightily to the decline in the deficit. The top marginal income-tax rate has risen by 50 per cent -- from 28 per cent in 1989 to 42 per cent this year. Yet federal revenues grew faster in the 1980s with Reagan's substantial across-the-board tax cut than during the 1990s with these two giant tax hikes.

Overall real federal revenues (1982 to 1989) grew by 24 per cent during the seven-year period after the Reagan tax cuts took full effect. But (as currently forecast by the Congressional Budget Office) overall federal revenue growth from 1990 through 1997 will be only 18.5 per cent. If federal revenues had grown in the 1990s at only the pace they did after the Reagan tax cuts, federal receipts in 1996 would be almost $50 billion greater and the deficit would be one-third smaller.

Income-tax receipts after adjusting for inflation rose by 16.3 per cent in the seven years after the full Reagan tax cut. Income-tax receipts will have climbed by 16.1 per cent in real terms in the seven years since 1990.

So where is the evidence that these tax increases actually raised revenues?

If tax hikes don't account for the lowering of the deficit, what does? America's victory in the Cold War. (The extent of Bill Clinton's contribution to that effort was in obtaining draft deferments.) In the 1980s the nation invested $2 trillion on the Reagan military build-up to vanquish the Evil Empire -- perhaps the only truly successful government program of the last half-century. Now we are rapidly demilitarizing, creating a vast budget windfall. Over the past eight years the Pentagon's budget has fallen by almost $110 billion in real terms. How's this for a coincidence: that's almost precisely how much the real budget deficit has fallen over that period.

Normally in post-war years the United States Government not only moves immediately back to a balanced-budget regime, but cuts taxes and then runs budget surpluses to begin paying off the wartime debt. In the post - Cold War 1990s none of those things have happened. No tax cut. No balanced budget. No liquidation of the debt. Instead defense cutbacks have helped camouflage a sustained non-defense spending build-up. Between 1989 and 1995, real defense outlays have fallen by one-third, while everything else we spend money on -- from peanut subsidies to the Mark Hatfield Memorial Courthouse in Portland -- has climbed by $300 billion, or 30 per cent. Last year federal spending on non-defense programs consumed 18 per cent of national output, a larger share than at any previous time in American history. The nanny state is alive and well in America.

So much so that we can now add the most recent and depressing entry to the Clinton fiscal chronology:

-- In July 1996 the CBO announces that the Clinton deficit-reduction honeymoon is over. After 1997, the Clinton baseline outlook steadily deteriorates in every year for the next decade. Then the government's finances implode. Runaway entitlement expenditures -- particularly for Medicare and Medicaid -- ravage the budget. The CBO predicts that unless transfer payments are curtailed the nation faces a future of "unsustainably high levels of federal borrowing," with the national debt ascending relentlessly from 60 per cent of national output today, to 150 per cent by 2025.

LETS GET THIS RIGHT DEMOCRATS ARE FREE SPENDERS AND THEY DO IT BY RAISING AMERICANS TAXES TO OUTRAGEOUS LEVELS.