The debt is a very abstract problem. It's difficult to trace any particular kitchen-table issue to it. The stock market is booming; unemployment is at regular levels. Inflation is higher than economists or consumers want, but it's not off the charts.
The merits of those numbers is certainly debatable, but they've at least been consistently calculated. They're the numbers we have to work with, and they do justify the idea that things are unpleasant, but not a crisis. The low price of US Treasury bonds is worrying, and definitely hint at a crisis on the horizon, but it's only partly due to the debt and more due to a generalized worry about the state of the US.
I don't know what to advise you as a single-issue voters. The solution is obvious and unacceptable: raise tax rates, close methods of tax avoidance, reduce spending on large discretionary budget items. Neither party is going to propose that, and no third party is going to get off the ground by suggesting it.
Republicans present themselves as the debt-avoiding party, and I think the best you can do is look for ways to tell them that you know that they've failed massively on that. They were handed immense levels of power to cut anything they wanted, and they wasted it on culture wars. You can try to shift their focus to actually the deficit, but that's a very big ship to turn. Their base isn't thrilled right now, but certainly isn't going to tolerate the other party gaining power, even if they did promise better governance.
Democrats would at least in theory like to raise taxes and reduce military spending, but it's damn near impossible. Republicans oppose both of those things, and the checks-and-balances system favors the status quo. It takes overwhelming agreement to achieve anything, and there remain many Democrats in right-leaning districts who are easily scared off of supporting the party on those issues.
I suppose you could go really off the rails and support the far-left approach of Modern Monetary Theory, which basically scraps the debt by conflating it with the currency. You pay off the debt with printed money, and then separately compensate for inflation by collecting taxes (and then just burning the money you collect).
Comments
The debt is a very abstract problem. It's difficult to trace any particular kitchen-table issue to it. The stock market is booming; unemployment is at regular levels. Inflation is higher than economists or consumers want, but it's not off the charts.
The merits of those numbers is certainly debatable, but they've at least been consistently calculated. They're the numbers we have to work with, and they do justify the idea that things are unpleasant, but not a crisis. The low price of US Treasury bonds is worrying, and definitely hint at a crisis on the horizon, but it's only partly due to the debt and more due to a generalized worry about the state of the US.
I don't know what to advise you as a single-issue voters. The solution is obvious and unacceptable: raise tax rates, close methods of tax avoidance, reduce spending on large discretionary budget items. Neither party is going to propose that, and no third party is going to get off the ground by suggesting it.
Republicans present themselves as the debt-avoiding party, and I think the best you can do is look for ways to tell them that you know that they've failed massively on that. They were handed immense levels of power to cut anything they wanted, and they wasted it on culture wars. You can try to shift their focus to actually the deficit, but that's a very big ship to turn. Their base isn't thrilled right now, but certainly isn't going to tolerate the other party gaining power, even if they did promise better governance.
Democrats would at least in theory like to raise taxes and reduce military spending, but it's damn near impossible. Republicans oppose both of those things, and the checks-and-balances system favors the status quo. It takes overwhelming agreement to achieve anything, and there remain many Democrats in right-leaning districts who are easily scared off of supporting the party on those issues.
I suppose you could go really off the rails and support the far-left approach of Modern Monetary Theory, which basically scraps the debt by conflating it with the currency. You pay off the debt with printed money, and then separately compensate for inflation by collecting taxes (and then just burning the money you collect).