Experts Tier round 2: Is there any hope that the US can eliminate its national debt in our lifetimes

Allow me to dive in and forewarn everyone that this will be very number and math heavy. Please get a drink and calculator ready. First, let"s go over what "hope" means in the context of this resolution. In this wording, "hope" means "chance" or "possibility. " If you say, "after that last touchdown, this late in the game, the Colts have no hope of winning," you are saying that they have no statistically reasonable possibility of winning. Our current national debt is $17.290 trillion dollars [1] with an average interest rate of 2.43% [2]. The most recent reported spending of 2013 was $3,454 billion [3] with revenue of $2,774 billion [4]. To keep assumptions at a minimum, we shall presume as many things do not change from their current trend as possible. As such, we shall presume that the government revenue will stay at a constant percentage of the GDP, which for 2013 was $15.686 [5] trillion dollars. Over the past 4 years, we"ve seen an average growth of 4.114% [5], so we shall presume that continues. Now, we shall of course talk about what changes need to be made, as of course, we cannot talk about this topic with absolutely no changes at all. The two changes we shall look at will be military and social security and medicare/Medicaid. Let us look towards the military first. There is growing support for cutting military spending and military involvement throughout the world [6][7][8][9]. I can make the argument that much of our military need is caused by our over-reaching military involvement in other nations. That goes outside the scope of this debate and we only need to focus on that cutting the military budget has demand by the US population. Currently, the military budget is $832 billion for this year [3]. It is already down from its high of $879.4 billion in 2011. There is easily enough room to slash $500 billion from the military budget (we can also argue that the in surge of workers from the military into the private sector will only create a greater supply of workers and so boost the economy, but that too is for a different debate). With that cut, the spending would be down to $2,954 billion. Let us now look at the other end of the spectrum from young physically fit people. Old geezers! Raising the social security and medicare/aid to 69 and then indexes it for life expectancy increases (meaning it always adjusts as life expectancy does) would save 44% of the deficit, or $300 billion (actually $299.2 billion but let"s make this a little easier for the numbers). Combining this with the military cuts we find our spending cut to $2,654 billion. Now, spending is tied to our population growth and inflation, while revenue is tied to our GDP growth. With inflation this year of 1.2% [10] and population growth of 0.7% [11] yields a growth rate of 1.91%. If we do some fun number crunching, we will see that the debt can actually be entirely paid off within 23 years (The GDP would be $38.08 trillion (though that would only be $28.94 trillion by today"s dollar) without raising, nor cutting taxes. We would actually see the debt peak at $18.14 trillion in 6 years before the surplus was larger than the interest to start bringing it down. Now, I will agree that it is not likely that politicians would do such measures, and they may take their time before they start listening to the people. However, it is clearly possible that it can be done within 23 years and so there is clearly hope that it can be done within 70 years. I will now pass this on to my opponent. Thank you, [1] . http://www.brillig.com... [2] . http://www.pewresearch.org... [3] . http://www.usgovernmentspending.com... [4] . http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com... [5] . http://www.tradingeconomics.com... [6] . http://thinkprogress.org... [7] . http://thinkprogress.org... [8] . http://www.reuters.com... [9] . http://www.publicintegrity.org... [10] . http://www.usinflationcalculator.com... [11] . http://www.theguardian.com...