I am a candidate in the May 15 Nebraska Republican Primary for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent Deb Fischer because she is ignoring our enormous and out-of-control national debt. In fact, she is doing much worse than just ignoring it; she is actively making it much worse. For example:
- Fischer voted for the new tax law which increases our debt by $1 trillion over ten years even after new growth is taken into account. The main features of the new law are excellent but need offsets to avoid losing tax revenue.
- The budget just approved by Congress and signed by President Trump, for this year and next, will increase the debt by $300 billion. It means that the deficit for FY 2018 will be $800 billion followed by $1.2 trillion for FY 2019 (see first chart). In FY 2027, just ten years away, the annual deficit is projected to increase to $2.1 trillion (see second chart).
- On Senator Fischer’s watch, for the six Fiscal Years 2014 – 2019, the new debt is likely going to be $4.5 trillion (just add up the totals for these years in the chart above). This means that by the end of her six year term in office, 20% of our entire debt of $22.5 trillion, will have been accumulated while she was in office!
Conclusion. The national debt now $20.5 trillion and growing rapidly, is by far our biggest long term problem. We badly need representatives in Congress who will stop ignoring this awful problem and start doing something about it. That is why I am a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
It Does Not Add Up 
Maybe a growing national consensus will occur to actually tackle our nation’s excessive ‘health spending.’ Tweaking the institutional connection to maximizing market share, the payer efforts to engage behavioral economics, our neglected 20th century Primary Healthcare and the denial of each community’s declining Social Mobility will only continue to delay its over-all reassessment. A continuing effort to challenge the Paradigm Paralysis and its origins 60 years ago will be both difficult and necessary. The cost and quality problems of our nation’s healthcare continue to worsen from neglect.
I agree with your assessment. The question is how we are going to change direction. Right now we are headed towards a huge fiscal crisis unless we make big changes. Will enough people realize what is happening in order to turn things around?
Jack,
I should think that your readers would appreciate knowing who are our creditors and what might cause them to demand payment beyond the annual interest, or even exactly how that interest is paid to them at this point.
Second, exactly where would you want to cut our expenses. The only area ever cited seems to be medical costs. And finally of course, who should suffer as a consequence of those reductions in the federal budget?
Too often I find these national economic figures leave the reader, or average citizen lost in such generalities.
Doug
Where do you plan to make cuts in spending to reduce the budget deficit and debt? I would suggest cuts to military spending as well as senator/representative benefits. No reason elected officials should get for free what the working public have to pay for. (retirement, health insurance, etc)
See my comments just below.
Our debt is held by the owners of U.S. Treasury bonds, which can always be sold in the open market.
We don’t actually need to cut hardly anything. We just need to hold down spending increases on many different government programs. This would bring the budget into balance over a period of several years.
We also need big changes in the funding of healthcare along the lines of: http://jackheidelforsenate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/American-Healthcare-Reform.pdf