Republicans Suggest Selling Gold To Pay Down National Debt

As we head to the early August deadline for the debt ceiling to expire, the politicians are rounding into fine shape. Republicans are now suggesting we sell our gold to pay down the national debt.

Gold Sweet Gold

As you’ve probably noticed, the price of gold has gone through the roof the last 10 years. It just so happens that we have a significant amount of gold in our federal government lockdowns. It seems like a natural tendency to just go ahead and sell it to raise cash to pay down the debt. As is often the case, such notions don’t work in the real world.

A Billion Here. A Billion There.

So, just how much gold do we have? The government isn’t particularly forthcoming with that information, but it is credibly believed we have between $350 and $400 billion. That is a lot of money, right? Yes it is, but it is a drop in the bucket when considering our annual and national debts.

Annual Debt

Let’s talk about the annual debt first. We are running roughly a $1.6 trillion debt just this year. Selling all our gold would pay down about 25 percent of this and yet still add another trillion dollars to the overall national debt. Does that sound like a solution to you? It doesn’t to me.

National Debt

We are now roughly $14.3 trillion in debt overall. Paying it down by $400 billion or so isn’t going to make much of a difference. In fact, it will buy us about six months before we are back up against the debt ceiling again. All and all, this is not much of solution if you run the numbers.

Wrong Approach

Is this proposal really a serious one? No. It is a bit of a joke, but does point out a serious problem. It shows that politicians are still not willing to deal with the major issue confronting us. Hard decisions have to be made. Social Security and Medicare have to be reformed. The military budget has to be cut. Taxes have to be raised. There is no other way to deal with the national debt. Until politicians are willing to sit down and deal with these issues, everything they do and say is just p…ing in the wind.

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