The Republican Party – Which Way Did It Go?
By Michael Gold
How would you feel if you owed someone $38 trillion dollars?
Some people with that breathtaking kind of debt load might feel compelled to get on a boat and sail off to some uncharted island in the Pacific.
That’s the amount the U.S. government owes to its many creditors. It’s a number that feels inconceivable, I know. But the amount literally grows every second. If you go to https://www.usdebtclock.org, you can see the numbers go up, flashing at you like some kind of weird slot machine or stock market ticker. Except, it’s no joke.
Each tax paying citizen owes $355,810 in debt right now to the various private and international governmental institutions from which we’ve borrowed. We owe China, our greatest economic and political rival, about $859 billion in U.S. treasury securities (source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080615/china-owns-us-debt-how-much.asp).
It makes me sick.
The Republican Party used to care about our national debt. So did the Democrats. In the 1990s, a Democratic President and Republican Congress actually balanced the Federal budget. We were a better, stronger country because of it. We used to be the world’s biggest lender to our other nations. Now we’re the biggest borrower, the biggest debtor nation in history. The Trump Administration keeps pumping up the debt too, with irresponsible tax and spending policies. This is not the way to make America great again.
My father, a small building contractor, and my mother, a hospital dietitian, taught my brothers and me to be judicious with our spending. Only spend what you have. That’s what my parents showed their children. My parents hated being in debt, because it let someone else had power over them.
Being in debt meant that you had to spend money, sometimes a great deal of it, just to pay off the interest you owed the lender. Yes, they had a mortgage, but they made sure they had the money to send the bank a check every month. In other words, they were financially responsible.
Not so the United States of America in the 2020s.
This great nation has a multitude of pressing problems right now. Most people don’t want to think about what we owe. Our supposed leaders in government certainly don’t talk about it. It doesn’t attract attention.
But the bills are coming due. The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2033, and Social Security will hit that dubious honor the same year or the year after (source: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/social-security-and-medicare-trustees-release-2025-reports#:~:text=The%20looming%20insolvency%20of%20Social,Medicare%20Trustees%20reports%20later%20today).
I write this as a senior citizen, who benefits from both Medicare and Social Security. Either the programs have to be cut, or taxes have to be raised to pay for them. Or perhaps Congress will come up with a formula that combines both program cuts and tax increases. My guess is the legislative process to arrive at some kind of solution will be long, bitter and ugly.
The situation with Medicare and Social Security is reflective of our generally bad fiscal picture. We’re spending far more on everything than we’re receiving in tax revenue. So the government is borrowing the difference. We’re very far along on the road to bankruptcy.
Our irresponsible fiscal policies are not the only problem with the Republican Party currently governing the nation. Inflation is hurting families’ ability to pay for food, housing, and electricity, among other necessities. Health insurance costs are going up. Where is the national discussion about helping citizens deal with the increasing cost of living? I hear nothing, not even crickets.
The Democrats are talking about affordability, so at least someone is paying attention. But do they have a real, viable plan to help bring household costs down? I’d like to hear more from them about what they plan to do.
Republicans used to care about the general prosperity. They used to believe in something called free trade, in which everyone enjoyed a world in which we buy and sell goods and services for the benefit of all.
I don’t see that now either. Levying huge tariffs on everybody except China, which is hysterically exporting its enormous surpluses of products to every port it can, makes no sense. It raises prices for consumers and slows economic growth.
William Simon, a former Treasury Secretary in the 1970s, used to say, “Let a free economy rip.” We’re way off from Simon’s vision. Tariffs are a terrible drag on the economy. And why is the U.S. government taking shares in private companies, like U.S. Steel and Intel?
The Feds own 10 percent of Intel. That can’t help but distort the company’s decisions about how it will conduct business, serve its shareholders and plan for growth.
The Federal government now also owns a piece of US. Steel. The government has “the right to appoint an independent director, close or idle existing US Steel facilities, change the company name and move its headquarters as part of its ownership,” states a report from S & P Global.com.
“US Steel also cannot make material changes to the corporation’s existing raw materials and steel sourcing strategy in the US, unless changes benefit the corporation in cases where raw materials are inadequate or imports accelerate technology transfers of facilities built in the US,” S & P Global.com says.
In other words, the government has control over US Steel’s decisions on how to obtain, process and market the products they need to serve their customers.
On the energy front, the White House has recently prevented the scheduled closures of several coal power plants, in the Midwest, Colorado and Washington state (source: https://san.com/cc/the-trump-administration-stopped-four-coal-plants-from-retiring-before-2026/#:~:text=The%20Craig%20plant%20was%20the,roughly%20half%20a%20million%20homes).
Private utilities made the decisions to close the plants because it’s not in their financial interests. What right does the government have to interfere with the companies’ rights to figure out the best way for their enterprises to prosper? Why is the government dictating what a private company should do? Operating these plants is increasingly expensive and unprofitable.
On the flip side of that, the White House is trying to prevent the continued construction of wind power projects, which were already approved by the Federal government after extensive reviews (source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-trumps-attack-on-wind-power-is-impacting-the-energy-industry).
These projects will help provide more electric power to our economy. People’s energy bills are already sky high from a lack of electrical capacity.
It feels as if the government is trying to prevent the future from happening. It reminds me of Communist countries that had quotas for how much iron and coal they had to produce for the next five years.
This smells like a planned economy, like socialism. We should all be suspicious.
Speaking of socialism, the Republican Party used to care about freedom. That’s why we fought the Cold War against the Soviet Union and won. Now, Trump seems to care more about how a dictatorial Russia feels than defending a free Ukraine, the neighbor and U.S. ally Vladimir Putin attacked in 2022.
I was not a big fan of Ronald Reagan (for the record, I was a member of the Democratic Party for decades, but changed my political affiliation to Independent, because the Dems have demonstrated that they no longer know how to talk to people in the real world). Reagan helped start us on the road to our deficit spending, but he stood up for the Free World. He helped defeat socialism. He understood how important freedom was to people – that it offered everyone the opportunity to work hard, advance their prospects, and discuss together how we can work together as a society, as a nation, to create a better future.
We currently have an Administration that doesn’t seem particularly interested in freedom of speech, the press, and education, across the world or at home, reducing our massive debt or improving ordinary peoples’ lives. It doesn’t want to listen to what anyone outside the White House has to say.
Instead, it’s focused on installing gold fixtures in the Oval Office, destroying the East Wing of the White House to build a giant ballroom, ignoring the rule of law, concocting schemes to enrich the President at every opportunity, rejecting our closest European allies’ friendship so it can take over Greenland, cutting minorities and people of color out of the American story, instilling fear in our citizens and beating and shooting legal protestors.
We need a Republican Party that once again stands up for the Constitution, freedom, and values and that helped make this country the beacon of liberty and prosperity that it once was.
Michael Gold is a Westchester based reporter whose work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers.
