$7,102,227,697,541.15 Hey someone at least pay the 15 cents it looks stupid.

Well, to help pay off the national debt? As said, tax religon. If not, then ban christians, jews, arabs, wiccans, buddists, hindus, anyone who is religous from voting. But that is not going to happen, so tax religon. Think about just property taxes! Catholic church is number 3 on the most land owned, it goes US government, Donald Trump, Catholic Church. But that leaves out luthern, methodists, jews, so forth. All that land is untaxed. Then income taxes, all that! One question, does a preist have to pay a death tax when he dies or is he exempt from that to?

I don't feel it can be paid off any time soon because of the simple fact that it continues to go up and up and up. You know as well as I do if you only pay the minimum payment on a loan it would take you the rest of your life to pay it off. That's because you would only be able to pay the interest off and never any of the balance you owe.

No matter how fast the economy grows if we continue to spend more money than we make (500 billion this year and every year under the current budget .) then we will never pay it off. We will not even be able pay the interest. The people we owe the money too are our own banks. What happens if the government defaults on a loan. I don't know. We call it bankruptcy. I don't know what to say about it. I think it is a huge problem and was curious of everyones opionion.

Just dissapointed that clinton had the budget balanced and was going to make a surplus. Remember bush saying well if you have a surplus you are taking to many taxes. I don't think so, when you got a debt like that you need all the extra money you got to pay it off.

I just have a question on this "debt account", have they joined all the diifernet or un-countable (for obvious reasons) places the government spends their money. How is this even calculated...?

As i understand it, the Government issues bonds to cover expenditures beyond the moola they receive/print. These bonds are what is counted in the National Debt. When we talk about "paying-off" the national debt, what we really mean is issue-ing less bonds than we buy-off in any given year. In other words, the Debt is always being paid off, every year. But usually we just tack some extra on, in the form of new 5 to 30 year bonds than end up givin us a lil extra cash to throw around. The reason the Debt is not such a bad thing is because many Americans use it as an investment. Most of social security, retirement accounts, and indeed almost all non-stock based investments are related to government bonds, whether federal, state, or local. If you really want to learn more about this kinda thing, you should take a macro-economics class, or i guess ill try to dig up some links for you.

Cas

[Edited on 16-3-2004 by Cascadego]