The Ron Paul Thread

Before introduction of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the average American wasn NOT overburdened with almost unpayable debt.

Ron Paul is principled and sincere.

First, there were never any ‘good old days’. In Figure 1 you can see that the United States federal government has been in debt during its entire existence. The magnitude of the debt in uncorrected dollars can be found at the website of the U.S. Treasury, where you can see that the U.S. debt was $75,463,476.52 in the year 1791. As it turns out (and as we will see over and over again), war is expensive and the American Revolution that ended in 1783 had cost $37 million at the federal level in addition to $114 million in expenditures by the states, funded by loans from France and the Netherlands and the issuance of paper money (Jensen, 2004). The population of the US by 1790 was about 3.9 million, so the debt corresponded to roughly $38 per person in 1790s dollars (the equivalent of $920 per person in equivalent purchasing power in 2010). So the picture has never been quite so pretty as the image that is so often laid out for us when we are told of the halcyon past in which hard work and a dollar meant something because the dollar once had more value than it does now. According to the U.S. Treasury, the closest that the nation ever was to being debt free was during the years 1835 and 1836, when the debt was between $30,000 and $40,000.

Also, as population increases, government gets bigger. People ridicule “big government” but the government for a nation of 300 million people should be expected to be large. It should not be a surprise that the annual budget is given in trillions of dollars because each of the 300 million people contributes an average of at least a few thousand dollars to the budget per year. It is simple math. And what do we get for that? National Parks, Environmental Cleanup, some health care and Social Security (not as much as other countries), unemployment benefits, research and development, and (increasingly) the military and its associated wars. The government can help to improve the lives of all people if our tax money is invested properly. But therein lies the rub: We have a responsibility to hold our leaders’ feet to the fire to ensure that they do invest our money properly! Remember, Benjamin Franklin warned us in saying that we have “A Republic, if you can keep it.”