First Presidential Debate: Actual Reason for our Staggering National Debt Ignored

During the debate on Monday rivals Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offered more of the same in the way of proposed economic solutions for America.

Trump declared he will prevent corporations from leaving the country. He said his proposed tax reductions will put an end to the flood or companies leaving. “That’s going to be a job creator like we haven’t seen since [Ronald] Reagan,” he said.

Clinton responded by saying she will jack up taxes on the wealthy and close down corporate loopholes. She mocked Trump’s plan as “Trumped up, trickle down.”

Trump criticized NAFTA and other globalist trade deals and noted the legislation was ushered in by Hillary’s husband.

Clinton said she wants to renegotiate trade deals and make them more favorable to the United States. She deflected previous criticism by saying “let’s not assume trade is the only challenge we have in the economy.”

Both candidates proposed spending a fortune on fixing the crumbling US infrastructure, although how they would pay for it was not addressed.

Clinton touched on the national debt, but only to attack Trump’s tax proposals.

“Independent experts have looked at what I’ve proposed and looked at what Donald’s proposed, and basically they’ve said this, that if his tax plan, which would blow up the debt by over $5 trillion and would in some instances disadvantage middle-class families compared to the wealthy, were to go into effect, we would lose 3.5 million jobs and maybe have another recession,” she said.

Trump responded, noting Obama has raised to the debt to an astronomical level.

“The Obama administration, from the time they’ve come in, is over 230 years’ worth of debt, and he’s topped it. He’s doubled it in a course of almost eight years, seven-and-a-half years, to be semi- exact,” he said.

Trump is correct. Obama has nearly doubled the national debt. When he entered the White House the debt stood at 10.6 trillion dollars. It is now 19.5 trillion dollars, according to figures compiled by the Treasury Department.

“Obama still has several months to go until the end of his second term,” notes Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse. “That means that an average of more than 1.1 trillion dollars a year will be added to the national debt during his presidency. We are stealing a tremendous amount of consumption from the future to make the economy look much, much better than it otherwise would be, and we are systematically destroying the future in the process.” He added an additional 1.36 trillion dollars to the national debt during the fiscal year that is now coming to an end.

How did we get here?

The national debt is directly attributable to the Federal Reserve. In 1971, under President Nixon, the United States moved away from the gold standard and the Fed was allowed to print money out of thin air. This opened the floodgates for unrestrained government borrowing, spending, and an exponentially rising “public debt.”

The Fed keeps the scheme going by holding interest rates artificially low. Since whatever the government owes is inherited by the people, it’s the people who ultimately get stuck with the bill. If the interest was allowed to return to market rates, it would help prevent the government from borrowing beyond its means.

Unfortunately, the obvious solution—ending the Fed and instituting a sane monetary policy—was not addressed on Monday night.

Sources

MarketWatch

The Washington Post

Treasury Department

The Economic Collapse