The problem with people’s attitudes toward the national debt is that everyone has forgotten why we borrowed in the first place. The theory was that if you borrowed rather than printed money, you were NOT increasing the existing money supply, and therefore, in theory, it would not be inflationary.
However, the Democrats forgot how to run for government without their Marxist agenda of bribing the people to vote for them. This led to always creating deficits. Add to this the NEOCONS who have done nothing but wage wars ever since World War II to defeat Communism and have spent money lavishly on trying to conquer the world.
During the Presidential Third Debate of 1960, the question about the outflow of gold from the USA reserves arose. This sparked a Gold Panic in the London gold market, whereby gold rallied to $40 for the first time, showing that the Bretton Woods System was beginning to collapse. The United States’ outflow of gold was not really from a trade deficit but from the fact that the USA was defending the world with its military establishing bases everywhere. That meant capital was leaving. Gold rallied again to $40 in the late 1960s, and finally, it forced the collapse of the convertibility of gold under the Bretton Woods System in 1971. Kennedy’s words were:
“Now, on the question of gold. The difficulty, of course, is that we do have heavy obligations abroad, that we therefore have to maintain not only a favorable balance of trade but also send a good deal of our dollars overseas to pay our troops, maintain our bases, and sustain other economies. In other words, if we’re going to continue to maintain our position in the sixties, we have to maintain a sound monetary and fiscal policy. We have to have control over inflation, and we also have to have a favorable balance of trade. We have to be able to compete in the world market.”
The dollars were being spent not to benefit our economy but to fulfill the dreams of the Neocons; when Communism fell, they refused to accept any real change.
We borrow, which is worse than printing because we have to pay interest on constantly rolling the debt. This year, we will spend about $1 trillion on interest, the total national debt when Reagan took office in 1981. At times, 70% of the national debt is accumulative interest. That means it went nowhere to improve society or care for widows and orphans, at least as the Romans did. Had we printed the money instead of borrowing, it would have been less inflationary and the capital would have created more jobs instead of investing in government debt which has only funded the Neocons’ wildest dreams.
