What is the national debt? Who loses from it? Who profits from it? Why is it a greater threat to America than international terrorism? In direct, non-partisan language, this book follows the money and finds the answers.

Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialist . . . Each has a laundry list for America on which the slow-motion cataclysm of unsustainable national debt is but a lonely bullet point among dozens of others. Full Faith and Credit zooms in on that point, liberates it from partisan programs and political orientations, expands it, explores it, and explains it.

The book examines key dimensions of our national life?from a military-industrial complex more menacing than even Eisenhower could have imagined to a Tower of Babel tax code that covertly translates taxes into secret subsidies. With the aim of converting bystanders into informed advocates of change, Full Faith and Credit is rich with eye-opening data, surprising case studies, and you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up examples:

? For every official the United States public has elected, its government supports 5000 unelected employees.

? $1 billion is the cost to destroy $16 billion in ammunition unneeded by the U.S. military.

? $20,973,890,000 is the total taxpayer cost to the Treasury of gambling losses deducted by millionaires.

With easy-to-follow graphs and charts, as well as 20 uproarious full-color editorial cartoons drawn from the prior work of Pulitzer Prize?winning artist Michael Ramirez, Full Faith and Credit locates the tipping point of the $19.4 trillion (and counting) national debt crisis and offers ideas on how to fix it.

The staggering United States debt has a direct impact on every American, yet few are aware of where the debt came from and how it affects their lives
The United States has a debt problem—we owe more than $18 trillion while our gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America, is only $17.5 trillion. To pay down the debt, some recommend austerity, cutting federal expenditures. Others suggest increasing taxes, especially on the wealthiest Americans. In Understanding the National Debt: What Every American Needs to Know, economic historian Carl Lane urges that the national debt must be addressed in ways beyond program cuts or tax increase alternatives, but change can only occur when more Americans understand what constitutes our debt and the problems it causes. The gross national debt is composed of two elements: the public debt and “intragovernment holdings.” The public debt consists of bonds, bills, and notes purchased by individuals, banks, insurance companies, hedge and retirement funds, foreign governments, and university endowments. Intragovernment holdings refers to money that the U.S. Treasury borrows from other parts of the government, principally Social Security and Medicare. This accounts for approximately a quarter of the gross national debt, but that is money that we owe to ourselves, not another entity. The more the government borrows, the less is available for private sector investment, creating a “squeeze” effect that inhibits economic growth. The most burdensome problem is the interest due each year on the debt. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar less for other purposes. Those elements of the federal budget which are termed “discretionary” suffer. The mandatory elements of the budget—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt—must be provided for, but defense and national security, education, energy, infrastructure repair and development, and other needs wind up with less. By understanding the national debt we have an opportunity to address our real debt challenge—its principal and interest.

The staggering United States debt has a direct impact on every American, yet few are aware of where the debt came from and how it affects their lives
The United States has a debt problem—we owe more than $18 trillion while our gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America, is only $17.5 trillion. To pay down the debt, some recommend austerity, cutting federal expenditures. Others suggest increasing taxes, especially on the wealthiest Americans. In Understanding the National Debt: What Every American Needs to Know, economic historian Carl Lane urges that the national debt must be addressed in ways beyond program cuts or tax increase alternatives, but change can only occur when more Americans understand what constitutes our debt and the problems it causes. The gross national debt is composed of two elements: the public debt and “intragovernment holdings.” The public debt consists of bonds, bills, and notes purchased by individuals, banks, insurance companies, hedge and retirement funds, foreign governments, and university endowments. Intragovernment holdings refers to money that the U.S. Treasury borrows from other parts of the government, principally Social Security and Medicare. This accounts for approximately a quarter of the gross national debt, but that is money that we owe to ourselves, not another entity. The more the government borrows, the less is available for private sector investment, creating a “squeeze” effect that inhibits economic growth. The most burdensome problem is the interest due each year on the debt. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar less for other purposes. Those elements of the federal budget which are termed “discretionary” suffer. The mandatory elements of the budget—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt—must be provided for, but defense and national security, education, energy, infrastructure repair and development, and other needs wind up with less. By understanding the national debt we have an opportunity to address our real debt challenge—its principal and interest.

Our national debt is now so high that most of us have stopped thinking about it, because the prospect of bringing it under control is unimaginable. We consider it a national liability and fear our children will be forced to pay for our current excesses. John Steele Gordon is a welcome antidote. In 1997, his book, Hamilton’s Blessing, offered a “biography” of the debt, making it very much a human drama while explaining the myriad, mostly positive, ways it has influenced America’s history since Alexander Hamilton first proposed the virtues of a national debt in 1792.

However, the 12 years since the book’s initial publication have been perhaps the most dramatic in the debt’s history?since it has more than doubled and continues on an ever-upward spiral. Now, more than ever, we need John Steele Gordon’s wisdom?his revised and expanded edition of Hamilton’s Blessing will put this historic expansion in perspective, allowing us to better participate in debate and discussion.

Bringing a remarkable national institution to life, Gordon offers, in the process, an original view of American history, and insight into both well- and lesser-known figures who have influenced and charted our voyage, from Hamilton to Jay Cooke to John Maynard Keynes to the present. The national debt helped rescue the Union during the Civil War and raise the nation out of the Depression?thus offering hope it may serve a similar purpose in the decades to come.

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“Neutering the National Debt” is a refreshingly different perspective on deficits, the national debt, and economic growth. The author uses clear language and practical examples from our everyday lives to shed a surprising new light on these topics. For example, his “nuclear war brain teaser” quickly reveals the dangerous paradox built into the idea of a balanced budget amendment. And that’s just one example of the author’s frontal assault on conventional wisdom; these pages hold many additional surprises. His argument should jolt all of us into rethinking many topics we had thought were settled, such as: the Reagan-era deficits; the Clinton-era surpluses; the “debt ceiling”; the supposed wisdom of “paying down the debt”; what he calls “the fairy tale of trickle-down economics”; and other talking points high on both parties’ political agendas. He explains how the USA has neutralized the perceived problems of deficits and debt in the past, and how we could do it again. In the final chapter he bluntly suggests how the Republicans and the Democrats could adjust their respective agendas in order to neutralize the national debt and clear the path to prosperity, then he finishes with his estimate of each party’s chances of pulling it off. As CNBC’s Larry Kudlow said, Steve sheds a brand new light on this subject, and shows that economic growth solves debt. This book is a must read for anyone who wants a new perspective on these topics; it’s a welcome escape from the tired, worn-out talking points we’ve been hearing from both parties for too long.

The Last and Only Time America Was Free of Debt?and How It Led to the Two-Party Political System
?An engaging treatment of a topic of perennial concern and frequent misunderstanding, this lucid tale of the brief moment when the United States was debt-free should be on every Congress member’s bedside table.”?Peter J.Woolley, Professor of Comparative Politics, Fairleigh Dickinson University
When President James Monroe announced in his 1824 message to Congress that, barring an emergency, the large public debt inherited from the War for Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812 would be extinguished on January 1, 1835, Congress responded by crafting legislation to transform that prediction into reality. Yet John Quincy Adams,Monroe’s successor, seemed not to share the commitment to debt freedom, resulting in the rise of opposition to his administration and his defeat for reelection in the bitter presidential campaign of 1828. The new president, Andrew Jackson, was thoroughly committed to debt freedom, and when it was achieved, it became the only time in American history when the country carried no national debt. In A Nation Wholly Free: The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson, award-winning economic historian Carl Lane shows that the great and disparate issues that confronted Jackson, such as internal improvements, the ?war” against the Second Bank of the United States, and the crisis surrounding South Carolina’s refusal to pay federal tariffs, become unified when debt freedom is understood as a core element of Jacksonian Democracy.
The era of debt freedom lasted only two years and ten months. As the government accumulated a surplus, a fully developed opposition party emerged?the beginning of our familiar two-party system?over rancor about how to allocate the newfound money. Not only did government move into an oppositional party system at this time, the debate about the size and role of government distinguished the parties in a pattern that has become familiar to Americans. The partisan debate over national debt and expenditures led to poorly thought out legislation, forcing the government to resume borrowing. As a result, after Jackson left office in 1837, the country fell into a major depression. Today we confront a debt that exceeds $17 trillion. Indeed, we have been borrowing ever since that brief time we freed ourselves from an oversized debt. A thoughtful, engaging account with strong relevance to today, A Nation Wholly Free is the fascinating story of an achievement that now seems fanciful.

Sovereign nations don’t have to borrow their money into existence, yet the U.S has done so since 1913. You cannot “pay down” the National Debt because all of our money is created out of debt. To reduce the debt would be to reduce the national money. The only solution is to do what’s been done many times throughout U.S. history, issue debt-free U.S. Notes, instead of Federal Reserve Notes and break free of the debt money system. The problem is the same for every nation on earth, as is the solution. Nations don’t have to borrow; nations can create.

The debt bomb is ticking. The U.S. Treasury says our national debt will hit twenty-eight trillion dollars by 2018. This means that every single day you keep your savings in paper-backed investments, the Federal Reserve destroys your money, your stocks, your savings account, your 401K. But just as the debt has more than tripled in the last decade, so have gold and gas. Gold and gas track debt more than any other assets on earth. So if the debt is doubling to $28 trillion by 2018, where do you think your money needs to be? Gold has been the greatest hedge against currency collapse the world has ever known, and gold has been the world’s wealth preserver of choice for over 5000 years.

From the authors of the national bestseller 13 Bankers, a chilling account of America’s unprecedented debt crisis: how it came to pass, why it threatens to topple the nation as a superpower, and what needs to be done about it.
 
With bracing clarity, White House Burning explains why the national debt matters to your everyday life. Simon Johnson and James Kwak describe how the government has been able to pay off its debt in the past, even after the massive deficits incurred as a result of World War II, and analyze why this is near-impossible today. They closely examine, among other factors, macroeconomic shifts of the 1970s, Reaganism and the rise of conservatism, and demographic changes that led to the growth of major—and extremely popular—social insurance programs. What is unquestionably clear is how recent financial turmoil exacerbated the debt crisis while creating a political climate in which it is even more difficult to solve.

America is unjustly worried about ”national debt,” believing it can no longer do the many things that mark it as a great nation. Discussions of national undertakings–including infrastructure repair, jobs programs, military modernization, and disease prevention–have all been stifled through fear of insolvency. America has convinced itself that it can no longer afford, as a nation, to do many of the productive things that it has done so well over its history.

That’s a great shame, because America remains a nation of tremendous resources in every sense, and the underlying assumptions about U.S. government financial instruments are not correct. America can never face the debt problems of nations like Greece, thanks to its fundamentally different financial system.

This short book explains why such fears should not hold back America, and why even the expression ”national debt” is neither meaningful nor appropriate for the United States.