It's Time to Cut

            What is the greatest threat facing our nation? It’s not Russia or China. It’s not North Korea or Iran, either. The threat is internal and of our own making. It is the national debt.

            As much as the thoroughly immoral and corrupt Bill Clinton disgusts me, I have to give him credit as the only president in the last 20 years to balance the budget. His successors have all presided over a national economy that piled on the debt, none more so than Barack Obama who doubled it.

            We Americans are like riders on a rickety bus that is careening down a mountainside road without guardrails. The latest man at the wheel refusing to apply the brakes is President Trump who has signed into law a two-year spending bill that is projected to add another trillion to the debt in 10 years.

            Conservatives pleaded for fiscal sanity. But Republicans who wanted more money for defense sided with Democrats demanding increased spending on infrastructure and social programs. Forecasts now project a national debt of $30 trillion by the year 2030, with fully a third of GDP going to pay interest on the debt. As long as the economy is booming, Americans on the runaway bus clamor for more goodies. But a crash is surely coming.

            There is only one solution: we must cut spending and cut it drastically. Discretionary spending represents only a third of the budget, so the big target has to be entitlements. But which ones? The only answer that makes sense to me is one whose time has come. It’s not new; it has been proposed by noted economists and brought back in one form or another for decades. The idea is called Guaranteed Income.

            The basic idea in every Guaranteed Income proposal is quite simple: give everyone the same monthly government subsidy, say $1,000 a month to every person 21 years of age and above. To pay for that, eliminate all entitlements, except perhaps Social Security (because it has been earned by those who paid into it). I won’t go into any more detail than that, leaving it up to the reader to imagine how such a program would affect Americans in all walks of life. I rejected such a drastic approach when I first read about it, but I’ve gradually come to think it might just work. It certainly deserves a national discussion.