Where Does it Go?

It comes to no surprise when I say America is in debt. In fact, that was a debate topic in the 2016 Presidential Debate. It proves to be a big problem and concerns many citizens. They pay all this money in taxes but they don't have a clue on where it goes. Most would say it goes to welfare or social security, but it goes to far more places. Places you wouldn't even think of. Also, how can we solve this national debt? The National Priorities Project, created an article called, "Federal Spending: Where Does the Money Go?". it goes into detail about the government spending and how much goes to where.

Another no-brainer is that America has quite the large budget, $3.8 trillion dollars to be exact, and as of right now America is roughly $19.5 trillion dollars in debt. How can we afford to spend that much? "The US Treasury divides all federal spending into three groups: mandatory spending, discretionary spending, and interest on debt." The first two categories make up almost all of the spending while the last makes up less than 15%.

The discretionary spending goes more towards the interest groups and as of 2015 the government spend $1.11 trillion dollars towards military, education, health, etc. All the charts below came from the article mentioned above:

Mandatory Spending goes more towards government stability programs and makes up 2/3 of the spending all together with $2.45 trillion dollars.

Federal Spending all together looks like this:

So now we know where the money goes, but how can we solve the national debt? Well starting with any kind of debt, you need to cut costs of your own. Now since this is the government we can't cut any and all spending, but you can sure limit. There's some (certainly not all) people that have been on welfare/unemployment for 5+ years. The original creation of welfare and unemployment was to create a stepping stone, not to create a living. Say you just lost your job and you're a single parent with 3 kids. Yes register for unemployment/welfare until you can get back on your feet. Do not sit there on your butt and just wait for your  monthly check. So for starters we should limit the people. We spend over $1.3 billion for people to sit on their butt, there's no excuse for those people to not be looking for employment and getting a steady income, not from tax payers.

Step two would be stop relying on other countries to keep our country afloat. This country is well over 18 years old, we should be on our own and independent. We owe trillions of dollars to China, Brazil, China, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and that's just to name a few. Why is that so necessary?

The Debt Ceiling was originally created as a limit to how much America could borrow from other countries, smart right? Well it has been raised over 140 times since it's creation and over 12 times since 2000. The chart only goes to 2014, and the national debt has only grew. As stated earlier, the national debt is over $19 trillion. Making the Debt Ceiling increase with it.