Conservatives, how do you plan on getting rid of the national debt?

Question

The current debt of the united states is $9,080,460,907,936.26. The estimated population of the United States is 303,416,338
so each citizen's share of this debt is $29,927.40 (this is growing larger everyday.)
The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
$1.44 billion per day since September 29, 2006

Part of this reagonomics thing that bush is using is spending an extremely high amount of money and cutting taxes at the same time. Now, I don't like tax increases, I don't think anyone does, but how else are we to pay this massive war debt off? You will blame the democrats for raising taxes, when it was the conservative (bush) actions that led to the tax increase in the first place. A business can not spend more than it takes it. We see the implications of this in the weak and weakening more american dollar.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._public_debt#A_brief_history_of_the_debt

thor girl - we are not in the smallest amount since world war 2

and $144 on a visa account? what the hell are you saying?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_Public_debt_per_GDP_1791-2006.svg

and if reagans tax cut ideas are so great, why did he have the highest debt since WW2? (not including todays debt.)

ret_roch_cop - the deficit isn't going down. Seems like the conservatives never read my links I post to support my answers. Try reading them next time and you will see you are wrong.

thor girl - i love how you used the deficit of the conservative presidents after they had been in office a couple yrs, but then you state the clinton one right after he had come into office so he had bush sr. debt to pay off. Love how the cons twist the truth.

Answer 1

It is so weird that we have had 3 Republican presidents and 1 Democratic president for the past almost 30 years. Reagan had the largest budget deficit since WWII, Bush #1 had the largest budget deficit ever, Clinton had a surplus, Bush #2 beat out his dad for the largest budget deficit ever. Did you know that Al Gore proposed a tax cut that was 1 trillion dollars less? That amount of money would have paid for this mess of a war. Now we have to pay for the national debt plus interest. What if China gets upset with us taking action in Iran and they demand we pay back all of our debt at once? The government should never go into debt in our names. Reaganomics has failed 3 times, just admit it. If you cut taxes, you have to cut spending and Bush didn't do that. The Democrats are trying to use a pay-as-you-go system for all new spending and Bush wants to veto every bill. Bush didn't veto anything when the Republicans were in power and they are the ones who ran up the deficit. Supply side economics was great for rich people; but it put lower-middleclass people out of work. You may credit Bush's tax cuts for getting us out of the recession; but we may be headed for another one and it's only been a few years since the last one. Thor Girl put up the deficits of the Republican presidents after they had been in office a few years and put up the deficit of Clinton which he inherited from the first Bush after he had been in office one year.

Answer 2

It’s interesting that some conservatives talk about cutting spending but when the Republicans were in charge of Congress, with a Republican president, they couldn’t seem to come up with any viable spending cuts. On the contrary, we have had budget deficits for every year of the Bush presidency.

I don’t understand why so many people are defending tax cuts that substantially benefited so few. The people who received the most benefit from the tax cuts were very wealthy before the tax cuts. They weren’t having difficulty and now they have distanced themselves financially from 95% of the rest of the country. We need to develop realistic approaches to spending and taxation and obviously the Republicans don’t have any.

Answer 3

Cutting taxes and eliminating many programs that are an albatross around our necks.
Brian The Cop, and Thor Girl are right, we've always had a deficit, and the deficit is shrinking, despite Iraq, Katrina, 9/11, and other disasters faced during the Bush presidency.

We haven't had a terrorist attack, but we've had a lot of disasters. The re-alignment in Iraq is working. There is much to be done.
But economists do agree that raising taxes would be another disaster for this country.

Answer 4

Cutting taxes and cutting spending is the answer. Bush had the opportunity to do this with a Republican Congress, but didn't. Reagan didn't have the opportunity with a Democrat controlled Congress. According to the Constitution, Congress holds the purse strings. Our debt will continue to grow until Congress decides to cut spending, or we have a president with the balls to use a veto and force them to cut spending.

Answer 5

Cut spending? Or maybe devalue the dollar. In Euro terms the debt went down by 1/3 in the last couple of years ;-)

Answer 6

We plan on eliminating the national debt by selling liberals into slavery.

Seriously, the Conservative response to this is that the deficit is not a taxation issue, but a spending issue. Tax cuts spur economic growth, which increases tax revenues. The problem is that we as a society are not willing to make difficult choices in order to pay off the debt.

I'm not sure if I buy all of that, but I agree that something clearly needs to be done. personally, I would like to see a balanced budget amendment added to the Constitution. let's force the government into fiscal responsibility.

Answer 7

Mores tax breaks for the rich, that good song of "trickle down economy." This song and dance show has been around fro the Republicans since the 1920's. Some even go so far not tax the rich. Only the little people pay taxes.

Answer 8

I'm not a conservative but it looks like they will A) blame it all on Clinton, B) blame it all on liberals, and C) smear any attempts made by Democrats to solve the problem.

Although, in Bush's defense, he did come up with a wonderful plan that would eliminate the deficit by 2012. For those keeping score at home, that would be the next suckers presidency who would have to cut back on everything to clean up Bush's mess.

Edit: It never ceases to amaze me how strong rote memory is with most conservatives. They all chant the same things over and over like some sort of magical mantra. It's astonishing.

Answer 9

Not spending $1 trillion in Iraq would have been a good start. Especially when we didn't get cheaper gas out of the deal.

Cutting taxes MIGHT help, but there is more to it than just cutting taxes. That's been Bush's problem, he seems to think 1 dimensional. Just because he cut taxes doesn't mean our national debt problems will be fixed. Just because no child was left behind doesn't mean our children were educated any better. Just because Saddam was in the Middle East and a horrible dictator doesn't mean it was worth the $$$ and lives (American and Iraqi) to remove him.

Answer 10

I'm not conservative but I have a good idea, we could have a car wash. I'm sure the government could put a really nice one together and what we don't raise there we can make up for with a bake sale.