President Trump is reported to have told Congress to ignore the national debt and conclude the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The spending bill would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. Currently the national debt stands at $36 trillion and costs us $1 trillion a year just to service that debt. That is 16% of total budget. Any increase in the debt means more even higher debt cost.

At some point, servicing the debt leaves little money for funding much of anything else. Debt in times of recession and depression is a good thing. In good times, such as we have now, we should be paying down the debt, not increasing it. There are three reasons why the debt is increasing. The first is that our population is aging requiring more money to support our elder population. The second reason is rising health care costs for all of us. And the third reason is inadequate revenues. The easiest one of these three to tackle is increasing revenue. There have been times in our history when the tax burden has been higher, and we have done well. It all depends on where the tax burden falls.

There is another bad option for solving the debt problem. That would be to print more money. This would have an inflationary effect on us all. We only need to look at post WWI Germany, and more recently Zimbabwe and Argentina to understand how bad printing money can be.

Craig Fournier

Webster