Thursday, June 7, 2018

Debt, it will eventually bite us.

Its one of the things that we accept but don't like, taxes.

Running on a platform that promises to reduce taxes is almost always better than using common sense and saying you might have to raise taxes.

Taxes are too high is the most common comment people make about them but what should we cut is the general problem.

So we cut taxes and increase spending, which is after all a recipe for ultimate disaster.

The real question should be what do we want and how are we paying for it?

The Government is unable to meet its annual obligations and has to borrow every year just to keep running.

To fix this you need either more income or less expenses or a mixture of both.

You might argue that we should eliminate waste, fraud and become more efficient, and we should, but that is not solving the budget problem.

We are also not solving it by ignoring the big ticket items and reducing small (at least by Government standards) programs.

This is complicated by the sacred cows we have, the untouchables, so to speak.

I don't want to ignore growth, since growth reduces certain expenditures and increases taxes without increasing the tax rate.  However we are not going to see enough growth to fix our problem, and eventually, our problem is going to have a negative impact on growth.

We keep kicking this problem down the road, supported by low interest rates and general confidence that we will pay our loans.

Both of those facts can change fairly quickly and with potentially disastrous results.

We either address the issue of where to spend our income or we face significant economic disruption, sooner or later.

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