Off the Publisher’s Desk 11-20-24

Trump is going to do something about the debt!

Over the years that I have penned this column I have spoke about the huge national debt that has accumulated ever since 1940. But, it has grown to be a monster over the last half a century.

The following is a piece that appeared in “The Capitol Guardian” last week about President elect Trump appointing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to do something about that debt. They’ve got two years to get it under control. “Good Luck”.

Thanks for reading!     ~Carlton

Trump Appoints Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy To Run Department of Government Efficiency, Promises To Look At Every Inch Of The Budget As Debt Set To Hit $100 Trillion By 2037

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Nov. 12 the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Tesla, SpaceX and X.com owner Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, which will exist “outside of government” but will serve an important function monitoring and offering recommendations to the President and the White House Office of Management and Budget for ways to optimize the expenditure of federal taxpayer dollars by the executive but also with what is allocated at the legislative level. Since 1980, the gross national debt, now $35.9 trillion, has grown 8.8 percent a year on average, breaking largely from its postwar trajectory of 3.5 percent average a year from 1946 through 1979. (During World War II, from 1940 to 1945, it grew an average 30 percent a year). Debt is incurred when expenditures exceed revenues, resulting in the issuance of U.S. treasuries to borrow the difference. Just looking at the growth of the national debt, if it were to continue growing at 8 percent a year, the national debt would grow to be about $100 trillion by 2032 alone. In the meantime, the economy’s Gross Domestic Product has only grown by 5.5 percent on average since 1980, and along that continued pace, would only equal about $45 trillion. That would put U.S. debt to GDP at more than 200 percent in just a short eight years. That’s just two more presidential terms. By then the trust funds will be exhausted and who knows what sort of interest rate crisis we might find ourselves in. We’d be on the brink of default by then. But if anyone can find a way to optimize how the massive federal government allocates resources, when Congress and the presidency have failed for almost a century, perhaps it is Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE. Trump has set July 4, 2026 as a deadline for DOGE to complete its work, in time for America’s 250th anniversary, but clearly the work to be done is actually long overdue. We’re on borrowed time, but the DOGE could be just the sort of novel idea that can produce a plan for the President’s budget to be submitted to Congress for adoption — before it is too late. Time’s up.