Dear Editor:
How long are we voters going to continue to elect those who pile more debt on our child and grandchildren so that they can "buy" votes when they hand out ever increasing amounts of "free stuff"? Claire McCaskill backed, and Trump signed, a bill to extend funding for grant programs to local firefighters and emergency responders. Jefferson City Fire Department was awarded a $274,461 Fire Act Grant in 2016.
JCFD needs to convince the taxpayers that they need this equipment, and then have local voters approve higher taxes to pay for it. It is insane to fund such projects by federal borrowing.
Have we really devolved to the point where the majority of voters approve of piling debt on our children so that we can have more free stuff? We Baby Boomers, Gen X'ers and Millennial's should all hang our heads in shame.
The following figures are inflation adjusted to 2017 dollars. From 1940-46 funding our WWII efforts caused our debt to grow by 340 percent, to $3.6 trillion. After fighting in WWII (407,300 Americans killed, 671,801 wounded) the Greatest Generation started paying down that debt. By the end of 1954, at the end of the Korean War (36,600 Americans killed, 136,600 wounded) the debt was down to $2.8 trillion. By the mid '60s, when we Baby Boomers started voting the debt had been paid down to $2.3 trillion. It was still $2.3 trillion in 1975, after the end of the Vietnam War (58,318 Americans killed, another 153,303 wounded).
Then the debt-funded, free stuff bandwagon really got rolling. By 1988 the debt had more than doubled to $5 trillion. By 2007 it had doubled again to $10.5 trillion. In the last 10 years it has doubled again and is now over $20 trillion.
This is not because of a lack of income. In 1940 federal receipts (taxes collected) were $0.094 trillion, 1954 receipts were $0.627 trillion, 1975 - $1.04 trillion, 2007 - $2.66 trillion and in 2017 they were over $3.0 trillion. A 380 percent increase in taxes since the end of the Korean War while at the same time the annual deficit has increased by over $600 billion.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of that interest on the federal debt will triple by 2027, to over $800 billion per year.