I’ve been following the gridlock in Washington around the need to raise the debt ceiling a bit lately. I just wanted to share a few thoughts.
The U.S. National Debt (it’s so large I’m writing it using capital letters (-: ) is approaching $14.3 trillion dollars. Let’s say that there are 300 million people in the United States (this is a bit of an underestimate now, as the population hit 300 million five years ago). That works out to about $47,000 for every person in the United States. Five years ago, the U.S. national debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now. So, over the past five years, the United States has spent $20,000 per person more than it has taken in. If you are an American taxpayer, have you, for each of the past five years, been getting $4,000 per year more than you’ve been paying in taxes over the last five years (whether in money, services, or some other form) from the U.S. Federal Government? I would imagine that, for most people, this is not the case. One might then ask where all the money’s going. I’m not going to analyze the budget in detail, but I’m just going to suggest that I would suspect that there’s a lot of money that doesn’t really need to be spent (for example, the government paying people or nations for jobs that don’t really need to be done).
There’s one more thing that I wanted to explore. Is it just a coincidence that this hyper-partisanship (to use a word that I heard on CNN today, although I’m sure it isn’t a new word) that is causing this problem arises around the same time as the Internet has become popular? I don’t think so. I would suspect that the Internet has made it a lot easier to connect with people who hold extreme opinions (whether on the left or right). Once one connects with others who share your opinion, it will probably be quite easy to drift into holding increasingly extreme views. Such a thing wasn’t possible 20 years ago when the mass media was virtually the only media available.
It’s a very interesting problem and it will be interesting to see what the solution will be.