Campaign Promises and Reality
The National Debt
By Andrew Zuelke
Chairman, Constitution Party of Wisconsin
National Debt Clock (screenshot from https://www.usdebtclock.org)
Due to the irresponsibility and selfishness of both Democrats and Republicans (past and present) in Congress, our nation’s debt is currently 36+ trillion dollars and climbing. Net interest payments on this crippling debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office, if nothing changes, will total $13.8 trillion over the next decade! Both parties knew we were spending money America did not have, and both parties in Congress deficit spent anyway year after year, decade after decade. Neither major party can feign ignorance and say, “How could anyone have foreseen this nation’s debt growing so large?” No, I’m sorry, Dems and Reps, that won’t work.
Also, with the work President Trump is doing on tariffs to level the playing field and open other nations’ markets to American goods, if he is successful, this will go far to lowering our trade deficits and reducing our national debt.
Elon Musk
The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Of course, that assumes that any savings from reducing our trade deficits actually goes towards the national debt. According to a Forbes.com article dated Feb. 19, DOGE leader Elon Musk is calling for returning “20% of DOGE’s targeted $2 trillion in savings to the 79 million taxpaying households,” resulting in about $5,000 in tax returns per household.
Refund vs. Debt Relief
Do not get me wrong; I like getting a tax rebate as much as all of you. I certainly agree that anytime you get a tax refund, that means the government took too much from you, and you overpaid in taxes. Instead, I am suggesting that if we save 2 trillion dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse, we put that toward the national debt. Shouldn’t President Trump veto any deficit budgets, signing only budgets in balance with a surplus sufficiently large enough to get us ahead of interest payments on the debt? Again, I am just asking. If more revenue does come in to the government but deficit spending continues, it will take longer to pay off the debt because of continued interest. Also, like other presidents before him, in a March 11 article from The Hill, President Trump said he would “not cut Social Security or Medicare…” We can cut all the waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE can track down, but if we are still deficit spending and are not addressing the largest spending programs in the federal budget (defense, Medicare, Social Security), it will not be enough to get us out from under this debt. Presidents and congressmen past and present knew this.
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