patrick.net

You want to eliminate the debt, cut military spending by 95%.

Deficit: $740 billion
Warfare Spending: $830 billion

Cutting 95% of warfare spending will eliminate the deficit and produce a surplus of $48.5 billion. Just by doing this one damn thing and not even touching anything else. Hell, even reducing by just 90%, would produce a surplus of $7 billion and we'd still be spending $83 billion a year, about as much as Russia and half of what China spends. The next 12 countries (U.K., Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Turkey), all of which are allies of ours, would spend in total $493.3 billion, which is more than enough to keep our most favored trading nation, China, and the crumpling Russia in check. It's not like we're going to lose our nukes either.

So, let's say we cut the warfare spending by merely 90%, which still keeps us as the biggest spenders in the Western alliance. Without any harm to national security -- hell, we'll be more secure since we won't have war profiteers creating instability and warfare to drum up profits, so the world would be far safer -- we have completely eliminated the deficit and created a surplus of $7 billion. And that's without touching Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any social services.

But we can do even better and increase the surplus substantially.

1. Eliminate the Department of Homeland Security, $35.5 billion
2. Eliminate the NSA and its cohorts, $75 billion
3. Eliminate the war on drugs, $15 billion just on the federal level. The savings on the state level would be a boon to local economies.

Again, without touching any social services, I've increased the surplus to $132.5 billion / year. With a national debt of $17,214 billion and interest payments of $220 billion / year, 1.278% average interest rate. The $132.5 billion/yr surplus is after paying the $220 billion/yr in interest. So the total debt payments is $352.5 billion in the first year. Without any budget changes other than taking the money saved by reduced interest payments and applying it to the debt payment, we would eliminate the debt by 2072, and that's without printing any more money ever again. And in 2072, we'd have about $570 billion in today's dollars surplus.

If we nationalize health care, we'd eliminate the need for Medicare and Medicaid, saving $717 billion/yr. The nationalized health care would be paid for by the income tax.

Doing this, increases our surplus from $132.5 billion to $849.5 billion, and our debt payments to $1.0695 trillion. This reduces the time to pay off the entire national debt, and America is debt free in the year 2030 with a surplus of about $1.3 trillion/yr, again without ever printing any more money, so that's today's dollars.

So there is no need for Grandma to eat cat food. Simply stop war-for-profit, illegal spying and wiretapping, TSA rapists, the evil war on people (er, drugs), and nationalize healthcare and our nation can be debt free and have a surplus of over $1.3 trillion/yr in as little as 17 years.

Fuck the CEOs who want your grandma to eat cat food. This plan is better and would actually work without cutting any social safety nets, any education, or any anti-poverty programs.