1 minute read
THE DEBT
from Fall Antlerette
OLIVIA BRECK // STAFF THE DEBT
The United States economy runs on a system based on debt. The U.S. National Debt is 22 trillion dollars and has gone up 10% since Donald Trump became president. The debt is a huge part of our government and there are many issues with it. The main issues with the national debt is the growing deficit, the interest rate rising, and the decrease in flexibility to respond to crises.
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Our national debt is 22 trillion dollars and our GDP (gross domestic product is only 21 trillion dollars, which means our growing deficit is 1 trillion dollars. This means that America spends more money than we obtain. We have more debt in the United States than any other country in the world which makes it harder to handle problems and make good investments.
The interest rate of our national debt is continually growing. The interest rate means that we still have to pay more taxes to decrease and/or stabilize our national debt. The interest rate needs to be dealt with and controlled in order to keep our economy from going under. After the next decade the interest rate is said to total to 7 trillion dollars almost double today.
The biggest problem is that our country won’t be able to respond to massive issues in the same ability of other countries. That means, if we have a war or a financial downfall, it will take longer to deal with the issue than we have in the past, and we will have to ask foreign countries for aid which would also increase our debt. Ways to control this problem are very simple. We could raise pension age for social security which would lower the debt a lot. We could also do one of the more obvious answers which would be raising taxes; yes this solution is simple but it wouldn’t be beneficial to the people of America. The fact that the country’s debt is so high should be very concerning. We have the highest debt in the whole world and yet we do nothing about it. If we don’t do anything about this and a war happens or a national disaster, we most likely will experience a financial fall worse than the Great Depression.
