Is It Possible to Be Free of National Debt?

            Once again, the Trump administration presented a spending proposal that would balance the national budget. He has presented such proposals in the past, but Congress did not approve them. The administration proposed a $4.8 trillion spending plan for fiscal year 2021 that would balance the national budget in fifteen years. In his proposal, the President asks Congress to cut foreign aid, boost the national arsenal, and increase spending for border security, infrastructure, and NASA. Russ Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget made the following statement.

The plan offered today proposes to balance the budget within 15 years by proposing more deficit reduction, $4.6 trillion, more than any president in history….

Under this president, trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, with debt as a percentage of [gross domestic product] currently at 81% and growing to 100% within 10 years, will be reduced to $261 billion in 2030 with a surplus in 2035…. Debt as a percentage of GDP will drop to 66[%] by the end of the 10-year window.

            Even though the proposed cuts will not affect Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that the cuts would be “devastating” to “millions of Americans.” Since Congress did not pass Trump’s previous budget proposals, the deficits are still high, as Vought noted.

The first three budgets have not moved in our direction. But deficits continue to be very high. The debt as a percentage of GDP [gross domestic product] is something that hopefully becomes a bipartisan consensus that we will tackle. We are going to keep proposing these types of budgets; and hope at some point, Congress will have some sense of fiscal sanity and join us in trying to tackle our debt and deficit.

            Trump proposes that the USA spend less money domestically and stop sending money to other nations because we continue to descend further into debt. It makes sense to cut expenses as much as possible and to get our own house in order. Once we are on firm financial ground, we will be in a much better position to meet the needs of Americans as well as to assist other nations.