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

I will dive right into this. To help keep things organized, I will use the tags that they did. The arguments that they applied against my R2 will be addressed in the appropriate tag. 1) Political Dichotomy in Congress My opponent claims that congress is more divided now than ever, while this may or may not be true, the point is irrelevant to the resolution. We must remember that by my opponent"s own admission, we were able to achieve a balanced budget less than 15 years ago. Politics had extreme polarity back then, and at all times in the past, just because it is more polarize now, does not mean that cuts cannot happen, or that taxes cannot go up. Nor does it mean that we will stay this polarized for the next 40+ years. My opponent also claims that republicans will never accept cuts to the military, he says specifically, "The GOP flat out hates reducing military spending"" This doesn"t matter at all. My opponent has already accepted that over the last 2 years that the military spending has dropped 5% (5.4% to be precise, or 10.4% when adjusted for inflation, [3, from R2] and it is expected to continue going down for as long as the forecast goes out). Just like with the legalization of marijuana and the recognition of gay marriage (let me know if you need sources for current events), even if the GOP doesn"t want to see it happen, if there is support from the people, the GOP will have to, or lose power. And as I"ve already shown, there is growing support to cuts to military spending. The same reasoning holds for social security, medicare, and medicaid, but substitute in democrats rather than republicans. This kind of belong in its own section, but since it is often linked to political stubbornness, I"ll put it in here. My opponent accepted that the retirement age can be raised to 69, but commented that we will continue to live longer. Obviously we can always re-adjust it. However, the source that I originally linked, suggested changing to 69 years old and having an automated adjustment factor so it updates on its own. That is a nifty idea, but it is more of the fine details. This debate is about whether or not there is any hope that this can be done. 2) Events My opponent listed several instances that we were able to balance the budget, but these balances ultimately unbalanced due to external events. Of all the instances that he provided, only one was not ended due to war. Of course, cutting our military spending would be linked to taking a more non-interventionist policy. Most of the cases were us intervening, or a reaction to our intervention. We took that role up in the 50"s and 60"s largely because of the results of WW2 which left most of Europe unable to take actions. That is no longer the case so we no longer need to be the dominant military force. We can have a significantly smaller force that contributes to a global force. That way, we can still play a role in the wars that my opponent "guarantees" (which I would argue as the world continues to become a less violent place, as far as wars go). 3) Not enough time Our time limit was 70 years. The plan I provided would be done in 23 years. My opponent did not disagree with any of the math involved. I also did not do anything in regards to raising taxes. We can modify just the spending side. Even if we don"t accept the instant cuts to military spending, if we continue with military cuts that we are currently going (10.4% every 2 years, or about 5% per year), then with the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid cuts and cutting the military 5% per year for the next 5 years would allow us to be paid off with in 27 years instead of 23. Throw a recession or two in there and each may set us back 5 years or so, but we can still be done well within the 70 year limit. 4) Owes more than exists This is a non sequitur on several levels. First being, that the total assets in the US are $188 trillion [1]. Cash, or "money" is only one form of asset designed to be extremely liquidable. So the idea that the debt is greater than all the moneys is false, it is just that most assets are not in the form of cash. Second, because debt is paid off over time, not all at once, the same dollar can be used multiple times as it is used through transactions in the economy. A very basic example may be if I have a debt and I pay $1 dollar (I"d pay more than $1 dollar, but let"s just follow the journey of that one dollar bill). That dollar goes to my debtee, who then uses it to pay one of their employees. That employee buys something from craigslist from me. I can then take that same $1 and pay it towards my debt again. So that $1 has been applied towards $2 of debt. As money circulates around and around, it gets involved in the transactions of far more than the dollar itself is worth (that is the purpose of having highly liquidable currency, so transactions occur more smoothly). So even if there isn"t that much cash that has been printed, a debt can still be paid off. [1] . http://rutledgecapital.com...