2024-3
Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. Consider this. The distance around the world at the equator is 24,901 miles. Dividing the speed of light by the circumference of the earth at the equator gives you 7.48. This means, if you had a gun that shot a bullet at the speed of light, and you fire the gun from a location at the equator, the bullet would go around the world and pass by you seven times and continue nearly halfway around the world again – in one second!
Distances in space are so huge they are measured in light years, defined as the distance light can travel in a year. With light traveling more than 7 times around the earth in a second, you can imagine how far it will travel in a year! Or can you? I can perform the calculation, but I cannot imagine the answer. Since light travels at 186,282 miles per second and there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, a light year is 5,874,589,152,000 miles, or approximately 5.9 trillion miles. Beyond anything here on earth, right?
Wrong.
If you go to the site https://www.usdebtclock.org/ and look at the left-hand side under U.S. National Debt, you can see that (as I write on April 9, 2024) the government debt is approximately $34.6 trillion, and it is growing every second due to additional spending and interest charges. If the Federal government debt was a star, it would be nearly 6 light years away from earth. The Federal government debt now exceeds the size of the U.S. economy, with a debt of about $103,000 per citizen and $267,000 per taxpayer. Any way you look at the situation, this is a government spending problem, as the Federal government controls more of the use of our economy’s production and regulations impair the functioning of our market economy.
The government debt problem is not one of insufficient taxes. In fact, an attempt to raise taxes to significantly reduce government debt would prove futile due to its adverse impact on economic growth and the tax base. The debt problem is one of Federal government spending.
Reducing government spending has various consequences depending on how it is done. It could have an adverse impact on economic growth, but only a temporary one, as resources shift to the private sector.
Until the mid-1970’s defense spending was the greatest component of Federal government spending. Since then, transfer payments have been by far the greatest component of government spending. Since the government does not produce anything, transfer payments mean taking funds from taxpayers and borrowings from lenders and giving these funds to groups of citizens, non-citizens, businesses, and foreign entities, or use them to grow government personnel.
At some point lenders can become leery of too much debt accumulation. The Federal Reserve in a confidence crisis will likely print new money to honor current debt coming due for payoff. But that can cause another problem – a rise in the inflation rate.
Politicians had better start reducing the size of the Federal Government. Can we as citizens make this happen?
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