UNIT 5 DISCUSSION BOARD Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

UNIT 5 DISCUSSION BOARD - Essay Example Other government funded interests such as education, military and infrastructure will suffer greatly as well. According to the Commerce Department, the yearly payment on this debt, the deficit, reached $725.8 billion. This represents a 17.5 percent increase from 2004 (Armstrong, 2006). These figures are well past most peoples’ comprehension. If, for example, a person were to spend a million dollars a day since the birth of Christ, they would have to continue the spending spree for 700 more years to have spent one trillion dollars. Multiply that amount by eight. That still does not equal the current national debt. Started in 1791, the national debt was, by those days’ standards, an incredible $75 million. Due to President Andrew Jackson’s prudent approach to government spending, the national debt was lowered to, again adjusted to today’s standards, a much lower level – $37 thousand (Suter, 2004). The Reagan/Bush administrations of the 1980’s ran the debt up by historic proportions. When President Clinton took office in 1993, the debt stood at $2.4 tr illion. The massive increase of debt was not used for infrastructure, education, public programs or even to finance a war. As a result of Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ economic theory, the money wound up in the pockets of the rich. In the early 1990’s, Congress adopted a ‘pay-as-you-go’ policy and federal spending cuts which resulted in budget surpluses for four consecutive years. Clinton announced that the nation could pay off the debt by the year 2013 if it stayed on the present course (Schoen, 2006). That optimistic predication has long since been forgotten. Since 2000, the debt has tripled. The ‘pay-as-you-go’ policy expired in 2002 allowing Congress to cut taxes, a politically advantageous move while also increasing spending (Schoen, 2006). The current President Bush administration cut the taxes of the rich while increasing military