ham-handed and half-baked way of looking at paying off the debt, but ok.
the 'secret document' reads as classic propaganda, going on to praise the private financial industry. right.
bonds can be replaced. the govt doesnt have to borrow money into existence, it can issue a dollar bill all the same.

here is a more realistic way of looking at the subject.
http://kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/NEED_ACT.pdf

what if there were purple unicorns that manufactured LSD with their horns huh? what if what if what if.............

I dunno

What if we didn't live in some surrealistic fascist police state?

What if monkeys flew around carrying buckets full of diamonds?

That's a pre 9/11 Dubya question. Our reality is so far detached from the world that existed when that question was valid we might as well be debating "What if 1+1=7?"

I remember reading somewhere, recently, that the U.S. will never pay off its debt for the same reason cited in the article: a lot of the bonds will simply never be turned in. A lot of the war bonds from World War II are still floating around out there.

Makes me wonder how much debt we'd be lugging around if there were an expiration date on those things...

I would think that the money which is no longer invested in gov. bonds would find it's way into the private sector. A much more efficient use of capital.

look at our military budget...untill that is a much lower amount it doesnt matter what you do to pinch pennies.

If the debt was paid down and the weight of the Dollar currency shifted in response, I'd say don't panic. At that point it would be (in my mind) much easier to start some sort of world wide currency, or at least pull more people over into using the dollar. Toss off the presidents and put on famous inventors /philanthropists and it would be good to go.

Also at the end of the trillions of debt, I would find it crazy if we didn't have a solid alternative to petrol fuel. Cost-to-Benefit ratio of Energy production is a key to pretty much everything in the economy. Definitely going to need better energy sources for reclamation after all the decent topsoil disappears.

Eck I digress, but my point was that even if we did pay off the debt, the global climate would be something entirely different than what it is today. So the fear mongering is a bit misleading

Dufus: They would make more.

Why are people still posting after this post?

/including me

If the United States actually had the fiscal discipline to pay off it's debt, then the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments sent each year to bankers could be used to fund all kinds of stuff that directly benefits Americans.

That would require politicians look down the road past the next election, and that's probably not gonna happen (at least with a sufficient number of legislators) any time soon.

If we get near it then it would be best for the nation to add more debt by pouring it into infrastructure and then repeating the process of getting back down to a specific point then dumping more back in. Problem solved. Somebody yell this at your senator in 25 years.

EnviroDude: duWeren't the bush tax cuts extended by Obama? So that couldn't have been the answer

Really, you need to get some new talking points.

Yes, you do, Envirodude.

Yes, Bush was the one and only contributor to the national debt.

I realize you can't fix a problem overnight, but at some point that line needs to stop going up before you can attribute blame.

/Vote for Obama
//End "derp"

Sorry, I meant:
/VoteD

Normally I'm a big fan of NPR, but TFA was a pile of crap.

Q: What would happen if we didn't have treasury bonds?
A: Well, we wouldn't have treasury bonds. And other than that, we don't know.

For one thing, China would have a much harder time pegging their currency to the dollar.

So the article says the US tax payers should pay interest to the banks so they have somewhere safe to park their money?

EnviroDude: WTH! Somebody nukes us, we will stay on the sidelines because we want a surplus.

Which explains Afghanistan, but not Iraq.

Land Ark: Yes, Bush was the one and only contributor to the national debt.

You know the reason for that spike when Obama took office is due to Obama revealing the actual cost of a lot of Bush's "off the books" spending, right?

dfenstrate: If the United States actually had the fiscal discipline to pay off it's debt, then the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments sent each year to bankers could be used to fund all kinds of stuff that directly benefits Americans.

No, the hundreds of billions can be spent anyway. The U.S. government is not revenue constrained. Don't get me wrong; you're 100% correct in that what devalues the dollar (needlessly) is all the hundreds of billions going to people doing absolutely nothing. And by that I don't mean welfare queens (who at least spend the money into circulation, raising demand for goods & services), but the banks who just take the money and sit on it. I'm saying it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's not like we have to pay off all our debts, THEN start spending. Take care of its own problems, THEN get to us? You know what a government that puts its own interests before the people's LOOKS like?

Congress would go "No more debt? Cool! Let's increase spending now and pay it off later!"

That article makes the worst assumption ever - that the status quo in 2000 will remain unchanged going forward. Let's see....dot.com bust, fraud of Enron, Worldcom, 9/11 tanking the financial markets, two unpaid wars, tax breaks, a housing bubble and TARP. There's plenty of blame to go around (I'm looking at you too, Clinton), but it seems like the wars and tax breaks were the avoidable events. The others happened from years and years of bad ideas. People seem to forget about the Wall-Street greed at the end of the Clinton years....new IPO's every week, day-trading, etc. That created a lot of jobs and tax revenue but was pretty unsustainable. Lucky for us people turned to housing to make the next quick buck.

One of the premises of the article is a lie (sort of). We never ran a surplus, even in the best budget year, the debt got slightly bigger.

Now, for the pedants out there, this was due to intergovernmental debt. In other words, that SS buying of treasuries. The Treasury Dept counts it as debt, which is good enough for me. So, even if the external debt had gone to zero, there still would have been buyers for T bonds.

Also, its not like we dont have history to look at. Andy J almost eliminated the debt, it was a 5 digit number at the end of one year while he was in office.

There would almost always be a low level of debt on an annual basis as tax receipts rarely line up exactly with government spending.

There are also long-term infrastructure projects that make sense to pay off over time. Basically our ongoing debt would look more like a mortgage payment (long term and well planned out) as opposed to a credit card used to cover operating expenses.

GAT_00: It's impossible to pay it all off. We still have debt on the books from George Washington's time, simply because the bonds were never turned in and there is no policy to void them.

Just figure out how much those add up to, and stash that amount of cash in the back of some government warehouse. It can't be all that much in today's dollars. Zero net debt.

We'd still have millions of people starving to death and unable to properly shelter themselves on a nightly basis.

Lost Thought 00: We'd still have millions of people starving to death and unable to properly shelter themselves on a nightly basis.

Picking on occupy wallstreet participants won't solve this issue.

Lost Thought 00: We'd still have millions of people starving to death and unable to properly shelter themselves on a nightly basis.

But, instead of paying hundreds of billions of dollars a year to service the debt, we could redirect some of the funds into the "social safety net".

Oh, who am I kidding? Tax Cuts for Everybody!

What if monkeys flew out my butt?

Partisan politics aside, it's actually kind of an interesting question. What would people (or banks, or companies, etc.) do without a safe haven for their money? What do you do with surplus SS money? What about municipalities, retirement funds, etc. that are obligated to put their money into "safe" investments? I'm not worried that it will actually happen, but it would be a bit of a conundrum. As much as politicians love to blather about SS being full of "IOU's", I'm not sure that taking that money and buying mortgage backed securities instead of treasury bonds is a great idea.

FTFA:
For example: What do you do with the money that comes out of people's paychecks for Social Security? Now, a lot of that money gets invested in -- you guessed it - Treasury bonds. If there are no Treasury bonds, what do you invest it in? Stocks? Which stocks? Who picks?

I thought the money goes right back out the door. Is it the case that the remainder from paying current beneficiaries is then invested? I also heard that the government borrowed against the Social Security Trust fund. Sort of like borrowing against your own 401k.

Or we could let the people you earned it keep the extra... there's unlikely choice that.

dustman81: So it weren't for the Bush tax cuts and two wars, we could have been debt free next year?

Thanks, Bush. I guess tax cuts for billionaires and getting vengeance for daddy were more important than maintaining the financial stability of the country.

oh no no no ... Seriously?

Firstly - yes, the two wars have a serious price tag, but there are bigger reasons.

The reason that we don't have the money to pay the debt off has more to do with the dot-com bubble bursting, 9/11's market crash and the housing bubble.

When that plan was drawn up, salaries were expanding fast, and stocks were climbing, because we were in the dot-com bubble. We had unemployment of 2-3%. If you had any kind of education you could get a job. The Nineties were just totally awesome.

/This new century sucks. Srsly