Does the national debt matter? It’s over $40 trillion and racing toward $41 trillion. Visualize that as 41 million stacks of dollar bills with $1 million in each stack! If it doesn’t matter to us, it sure isn’t going to matter to most politicians!

For the first 200 years, we handled the debt rather well. We founded the nation, fought the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and 2 World Wars, suffered the Great Depression, dealt with Korea and Vietnam, and other massive expenditures. The national debt in 1980 was still under $1 trillion.

However, In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for President. He had a plan to balance the budget and pay off the debt. It was to cut taxes for corporations and rich people. They would take those tax savings and create countless new jobs. This would generate enormous new tax revenue and the end of our debt problem forever!

George H.W. Bush ran against Reagan in the 1980 Republican Presidential Primaries and called the proposal “Voodoo Economics”. Bush Sr. dropped the term when he accepted Reagan’s offer of the V.P. spot on the ticket. But he was right about the tax plan. Eight years of Reagan’s plan produced 8 years of budget deficits and a national debt increase to around $2.7 trillion from the less than $1 trillion.

Republican politicians have sold that plan, or a variation of the plan, ever since. As long as we buy it, they will sell it! All this plan has done is make the rich even richer and saddled the nation with an obscene amount of debt. If we don’t start to deal with this problem now, our kids and grandkids will have few choices as they face this financial nightmare!

Thanks to “Voodoo Economics”, our annual interest payment on the national debt is now close to our total debt of less than $1 trillion in 1980! And it’s about the same amount as our Defense Department spending for FY 2026! Massive debt is a financial cancer that has destroyed many a host!

Ben M. Petty

Tullahoma