DRAFT

MGM&USP Document#63

 Primary Causes of the National Debt

(Updated June 20, 2016)

(This is a work in progress. Please provide comments/suggestions/additional actions to PeopleNow.org by email: RefineThePlan@PeopleNow.org or Fax 703-521-0849)

63  U.S. wastes about $900 billion dollars annually on illegal wars, occupations, nuclear and other offensive weapons, covert operations, overseas bases and facilities, huge standing armies, etc. even though we have no credible enemies.

64  The Treasury’s website reports that the U.S. Government has paid approximately $9 trillion of interest on the national debt during the past 26 years. This is over half of the current national debt. If the government had been printing its own money the debt would have been reduced by more than half. And that was just the interest for 26 years. Also see 100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility Posted Dec 22, 2013, by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt and Amend the Fed: We Need a Central Bank that Serves Main Street Posted on December 7, 2013 by Ellen Brown.

65  The Federal Reserve the U.S. Treasury, FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have provided apparently as much as $37 trillion of bailouts, grants, zero or very low interest loans and loan guaranties to U.S. and foreign financial institutions.

66  Many corporations and wealthy Individuals in the 1% pay little or even no taxes and are attempting to use the fiscal cliff to pay even less. U.S. corporations have fought paying taxes since at least the Civil War, despite building their businesses with American research, infrastructure and education systems.

66.1     For every dollar of workers' payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents

66.2     An amount equal to ONE-HALF the GDP, $8 to $12 trillion, is held untaxed overseas by rich Americans and American corporations resulting in an annual tax loss of about $260 billion

66.3     Corporations stopped paying HALF OF THEIR TAXES after the recession. After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, corporations have paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

67  According to the November 13, 2012 report: The CEO Campaign to “Fix the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks” authored by Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger, Institute for Policy Studies:

67.1     The Bush Tax Cuts for the richest 2% cost the Treasury about $100 billion a year.

67.2     U.S. corporate income taxes as a percentage of the nation’s total tax receipts, stand at a 50-year low, even as corporate profits are peaking at a 50-year high.

67.3     More than 80 CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations are using the Fiscal Cliff scare tactics and the Fix the Debt Campaign (www.fixthedebt.org) as a Trojan Horse to reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly by less spending on earned-benefit programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, while promoting a rash of corporate tax breaks as what they call “pro-growth tax reform”. This scheme has been very successful and has exploited the poor and elderly, increased the debt, hurt the 99%, and has grown the salaries of these CEO’s not the economy.

67.4     Of these CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

68 Wall Street executives's insatiable greed caused the Great Crash of 2008 in which eight million Americans lost their jobs and business and personal tax revenues plummeted, expenditures rose to assist the unemployed and deficits rose. Wall Street is still collecting obscene bonuses.