Dometic Policy
Why can’t the federal government balance its budget?
Watch this Youtube video:
United States Budget Dilemma.wmv
I’m not sure I completely agree with Mr. Mason’s gloom-and-doom predictions, but his
math is correct. The federal government now spends more just on entitlements and debt
service than all the revenue it brings in each year. If we kept taxes the same and shut
down the entire government, the military, everything, we still wouldn’t have enough
money to keep up with entitlement payments and interest.
This week’s assignment should be pretty easy. All you have to do: balance the federal
budget and explain how to address our $27 trillion national debt.
I’m serious. This is going to have to be done within the next decade, and its your tax
money and government services at stake. You have just as much right to have input into
these choices as anybody else.
Instead of writing an essay this week, go to the website of the Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget and find their Budget Simulator:
http://www.crfb.org/debtfixer/
Pretend you’ve been elected to Congress, and now serve on both the Appropriations
(spending) and Ways and Means (tax) committees. Follow the directions and work
through the simulation until you’ve found a way to stabilize the federal debt. You have a
short-term goal of stabilizing the debt at no more than 90% of the economy by 2032 –
still shockingly high, but you have to start somewhere, right? You then have a long-term
goal of stabilizing the national debt at its historical average of about 60% of the
economy by 2050.
It’s not easy, but if you keep making hard choices (watch your progress on the right side
of the screen), you’ll eventually get to a screen that says “You fixed the debt.” Use the
“Print” feature to create a printer-friendly version of your results, then right-click and
save that page as a PDF file.
