Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

‘Gentlemen, This Is A Football’: It’s Back To Basics To Tackle The $40 Trillion National Debt

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There is a reality we must acknowledge to begin moving toward national fiscal solvency and sanity — resources are finite. Accepting this fundamental fact is our Vince Lombardi moment to zero-in on the basics, just as his Green Bay Packers team did after he delivered his famous line, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” They then went on to win the NFL Championship that year.

Getting back-to-basics with our country’s finances means we first must deal with our unsustainable practice of borrowing $2 trillion each year to fill in the gap between spending $7 trillion while only bringing in $5 trillion. Adding $2 trillion to our debt annually over the last decade has quickly doubled our liability from $20 trillion in 2017 to $40 trillion now.

Yet while we are still enjoying growing capital markets, the concerns over our growing national debt are increasingly difficult to ignore as our country spends over $1 trillion each year on debt interest (roughly equivalent in size to our U.S. Military and Medicare budgets). Furthermore, U.S. Treasury bonds now carry debt risk that has pushed up interest rates, and our debt is greater than our gross domestic product.

Hitting the $40 trillion mark is another red-light warning that demands we focus on fundamentals to overcome this huge economic and national security threat that has been decades in the making under both Republican and Democratic leadership.

For starters, there is a back-to-basics gameplay gaining bipartisan momentum in Congress that would signal to the states and world that America is tackling its spending problem. And the play? — to reduce the deficit-to-GDP ratio from 6% to 3% over the next 10 years — and then in the following 10 years, get our country back to a balanced budget. The fact that this is gaining much-needed support is encouraging and could serve as the needed kickoff to a multifaceted, coordinated effort over multiple decades to also get our debt-to-GDP ratio down to a manageable level.

This will require difficult decisions, fiscal discipline and leaders willing to look beyond the next election and fully engage in the work of restoring our country’s solvency. Examples of this challenging work include:

• Restructuring our major spending programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that are going insolvent in the early to mid 2030s. They need to become viable for the most vulnerable, for the long-term — while finding new path for the young that leverages the power of time.
• Delivering a safety net designed to move Americans in tough times   toward lasting independence.
• Protecting every taxpayer dollar from fraud. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned that as much as ten percent of our federal budget is lost to fraud each year. Thanks to President Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, there is a serious effort to find and root it out.

In Indiana, we know that major turnarounds are possible, whether in college football or government finances.

While our Indiana University Hoosiers have suffered more losses than any other college football team — 715 — last year they won the championship, and coach Curt Cignetti stated, “There is no magic here. It is fundamentals.”

While the IU Hoosiers had to develop an intense focus on fundamentals to overcome the long-seated challenges, so did the State of Indiana. We were operating for years under fiscal duress and in the year 2002, our state delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to school districts so our books could close “in the black” with six cents — yes, 6¢.

That was Indiana’s Lombardi/Cignetti back-to-fundamentals moment. We had to make changes, and after more than 20 years of grit, determination and innovation, our state has gone from six cents to common sense and now has a healthy reserve, low debt, well-funded pensions and a AAA credit rating.

Turnarounds happen when there’s extraordinary focus and discipline, and that is now needed from us as Americans. We must get to work to save ourselves from a debt spiral crisis of epic proportions that will affect our families, our fortunes and our freedom.

It is high time we get back to basics and come together as the team of States to support our federal government in delivering a credible play book to restore our nation’s fiscal solvency, strength, stability … and financial independence.

America has overcome enormous challenges before — getting our fiscal house in order must be one of them.

Elise Nieshalla serves as Indiana’s State Comptroller and Chair of the National Debt Crisis Task Force for State Financial Officers Foundation.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.