Republicans have fashioned themselves as the austere bunch since President Obama assumed office, fighting him on spending with unconventional tactics and stringent proposals. They used the debt ceiling, which once was an arcane and rudimentary responsibility of Congress, as leverage to extract fiscal concessions from Democrats. They suggested bold budgets: Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” was the party’s pamphlet, but ideas like the self-descrpitive Cut, Cap, and Balance Act and Rand Paul’s five-year balanced budget have been bold supporting documents.
But at no point has any of them said they could eradicate the entire national debt, which is currently more than $19 trillion, in less than a decade.
Donald Trump just did.
In a weekend interview with the Washington Post, the GOP candidate for president said he could knock it out “over a period of eight years”, citing trade policy as his wrecking ball.
“I’m renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on. With China, $505 billion this year in trade. We’re losing with everybody,” he told reporter Bob Woodward.
When asked, Trump said he didn’t “think” he’d need to consider tax increases to accomplish his goal. (Woodward didn’t ask if there was any spending Trump would cut.)
“The power is trade. Our deals are so bad,” Trump stated.
In their story about the interview, Woodward and colleague Robert Costa wrote that most economists would consider the elimination of all federal debt over eight years “impossible[,] because it could require taking more than $2 trillion a year out of the annual $4 trillion budget to pay off holders of the debt.” I’d be curious to know which economists wouldn’t say that.
Mandatory spending itself — the sort that is already authorized by law and generally outside Congress’s yearly control — is estimated to consume $2.49 trillion this fiscal year. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it will grow to $3.85 trillion by 2025. Accounting for nearly half of this money in 2016 (and more as time goes on) are Medicare and Social Security, neither of which Trump has said he would reform.
What his adviser Barry Bennett said Trump could do, though, is sell a mother lode of government assets, which would get us at least $16 trillion of the way there.
“Oh, my goodness. Do you know how much land we have? Do you know how much oil is off-shore and in government lands? Easily.” he told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing on Sunday.
He added that the Trump campaign “will work on” releasing a more detailed plan.
According to the General Accountability Office, the U.S. government held $3.2 trillion in assets at the start of fiscal year 2016, mostly in student loans receivable and net property, plant and equipment. This does not account for the land of which Bennett spoke, which is classified as stewardship land, nor does it include natural resources.
“Stewardship land is land that the government does not expect to use to meet its obligations,” the GAO reports. “Stewardship land is measured in non-financial units such as acres of land and lakes, and the number of National Parks and National Marine Sanctuaries.”
A 2015 study prepared for the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that the federal government held $1.8 trillion of land in the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia.
