Op-Ed: How to Get Our Nation’s Debt under Control

By Steve Levy

Our nation’s debt just hit $40 trillion and our yearly $2 trillion deficits are now the new normal.

There seems to be no serious appetite on either side of the aisle to tackle these daunting issues. 

Our younger generation that obsesses over trans bathrooms should instead be demanding that their elders do the moral and responsible thing and get these budgets under control so they are not paying for it for the rest of their lives. 

Make no mistake, it is the reckless, incompetent spending by our nation’s leaders that is the main culprit causing the unaffordability crisis for this present generation.

The interest on the national debt now consumes over 15% of the total budget. That’s more than we spend on defense. Only entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare take out a bigger chunk of the budget.

This huge amount of interest is what causes the Federal Reserve to yank up interest rates. They are now over 6.5%, while in the first Trump administration they were between 2% and 3%. 

The rate escalated when the Biden administration spent over $4 trillion in projects that were unnecessary after the initial shock over Covid had ebbed. That led to inflation rates of 9% with an overall increase in prices of over 20% in the four years under Biden. That made everything way more expensive and caused people taking out a $500,000 mortgage to pay an additional $14,000 a year on their house payments.

My co-publisher, John Zaher, sounded the alarm bells on this last year, pointing out the dangers of debts and deficits that they pose to our economy and the need to cut wasteful spending.

But Republicans have not shown an interest in tackling this beast, either. Donald Trump ran on many things, including closing the border and making us energy independent, but fiscal conservatism was not part of the equation. In fact, he often bragged about liking debt and using it to his advantage. Well, that might work in the private sector where you can always declare bankruptcy. It doesn’t work so well in the public sector.

There are at least some hopeful signs, though. The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and now the anti-fraud campaigns being waged by the FBI, Department of Justice and Vice President JD Vance are cracking down on some of the wasteful spending in various areas, including the education and healthcare systems.

But much more must be done. There must be some type of reckoning with entitlements.

Had the Democrats not demagogued the issue of Social Security decades ago by killing a proposal to allow part of the Social Security trust fund to be tied to Standard and Poor’s stock index, we would now have $6 trillion more in the reserve fund than is presently the case, and our Social Security problems would’ve been solved.

It’s not too late to start.

As to spending, we need a constitutional amendment that would require a balanced budget in five years. That can be accomplished rather easily through the one-penny program, which would require that every federal program, with a few exceptions, be cut by one penny for every dollar spent.

If we can do it with our household budgets, the government can do it for public expenditures.

Some will try to make the claim that it was the Trump tax cuts of 2017 that led to the large deficits.

This is simply not true. 

The historical record is clear. Tax cuts actually bring in more revenue because they spur the economy. That was the case when Democrat John Kennedy did it in the 1960's, when Republican Ronald Reagan did it in the 1980's; when President Donald Trump did so in 2017.

as a fiscal hawk, but his massive increases in defense created a huge hole in the budget.

The post-9/11 wars of the George W. Bush administration, coupled with a prescription drug Medicare Part D  program that wasn’t paid for, added to the budget hole. Then things really exploded in the Obama years after the real estate crash. And then Covid gave the excuse for a big spender to go wild.

As spending increased exponentially during World War II because we faced an existential threat, but when the war was over, the budget came back down to normal. Not so with Covid. The $4.4 trillion budget in 2019 ballooned to $7.4 trillion and it stayed there ever since, years after the pandemic had faded.

The problem is that entitlements are so much a part of our budget that they drown out the discretionary part of the budget. So even tinkering here and there with some of these programs, while getting you some relief, cannot tame the beast.

History has shown that legislators on both sides of the aisle back down from implementing serious restructuring.

The way to get it accomplished is via a bipartisan commission with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, who can come up with proposed cuts. It doesn’t even have to be elected officials making the proposals.

It would be similar to the BRAC commission that was created to reduce the number of surplus military bases after the fall of the Iron Curtain. No legislator wanted to vote for a bill that would kill a base in their district, so they punted it to the commission, which made the list. 

There was still accountability in that Congress had the ability to pass a resolution by way of a majority vote to prevent the commission’s recommendations from going through. In the case of the BRAC commission, Congress allowed the proposed cuts to go through, because the individual members of Congress would not be on the hook for the vote.

That’s the same type of process that will be needed to get our budget under control.

We’ve often objected to legislators voting for massive spending increases, and then refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for it. There’s a moral and fiscal obligation to pay for things you authorize in the budget. The next time around, instead of grandstanding by saying they won’t vote for raising the debt limit, the fiscal conservatives should agree to raise the debt limit on the condition that a balanced budget amendment be passed and by beginning the process to get the states to amend the Constitution.

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Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of the “On the Right Side Podcast.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, steve@commonsensestrategies.com