How to Fix National Debt

Kaleb Mendenhall

Mr. Burke

12/15/13

Business Comm.

How to Fix National Debt

As we all know our federal government is severely in debt! Everybody has their opinions on how we can cut spending here and there. But, if we look closer into the past of our financial problems we actually aren't sitting as bad as we think we are. We are in a great position right now to help solve our long term problems. The idea of cutting spending back on our defense spending is an idea that almost everyone is in agreement with. Conservatives are right that we are spending way too much money and debt is an issue. Tam Hunt from the Santa Barbara Independent says that "I feel that they're off the mark in their solutions and in the degree to which they worry about the national debt." Hunt has done his research and looked at the past financial deficits and found that the deficit is actually half of what it was during the peak of the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. The year ending deficit for 2013 is projected to be $670billion down from $1.4 trillion in 2009.

So what do we do about long term spending? Well As you can tell from this pie chart below, Defense, social security, and Medicare are the top three government expenditures. But, Medicare and Social Security are paid for with payroll taxes. Defense and International Security Assistance is the biggest expense by far that is being paid for with income taxes, which amounts to 27% of total budget included with benefits for veterans and retirees. The total defense budget is about 1 trillion dollars.

As we take a look into what other countries are spending on Defense on this bar chart, it is easy to tell that we are spending an enormous amount compared to other Countries. We are spending about eight times our nearest competitor, China.

So, it is easy to see that one of our biggest financial problems that is causing our debt to keep increasing is the spending on our defense. If we could come together and solve our long term problem of debt soon then it would be a lot easier to gain control of the financial part of defense and help our country turn around the debt problem before it gets on down to our kids and progressively worsens.