ARNN: Wiggin Breaks Down the National Debt

Below is a portion of Addison Wiggin?s interview with America?s Radio News Network. Wiggin is the author of the international bestseller The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble and editor of the 5-Minute Forecast. He talks about the national debt with co-hosts Chris Salcedo and Lori Lundin.

To listen to the interview, click here.

Transcript:

Lori Lundin, Co-Host:? Let?s talk about our debt here at home. We?ve got two political parties that are pointing fingers at one another, blaming each other. We?ve got the current administration basically saying they walked into a mess and that?s it?s really not their fault. Then we?ve got the Republicans saying that this president and this administration has made things worse.

How did we get into this mess? Is it true that these Bush tax cuts and the two wars and the Medicare prescription drug benefit contributed greatly to our deficit? Or are there other reasons that we?re not talking about?

Wiggin:?We spent 2? years making the movie I.O.U.S.A, which was a documentary film following David Walker, the former comptroller general of the country, around the country as he tried to convince people that the fiscal path that the U.S. was on was already unsustainable even before the election year in 2008. We started filming in 2005, and we actually premiered the film in 2008. So many of the problems that have reached a fever pitch now existed prior to the current administration.

We premiered that film on Aug. 22, 2008. So Obama wasn?t president yet. But six weeks later, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, and we went into overdrive in the bailout period, and kicking in the stimulus payments to state and local governments. And while we were already on a disastrous fiscal course, people weren?t talking about it. And our film was seen as kind of gloom and doom, ?We don?t want to talk about that.?

But as the new administration came in, they claimed they had inherited a mess. But they went into overdrive, spending four or five times the amount of the previous administration. So the problems existed, they just got exacerbated and made terribly worse over the past couple of years. Neither party is capable of admitting any kind of fault and/or proposing solutions that will even address the underlying causes.

Salcedo:?Addison Wiggin is our guest right now. He?s a renowned economist, the executive publisher of Agora Financial, the author of the book The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble.

And Addison, there?s this phrase being thrown out, I wanted to run it by you ? and I talked to a various amount of our economists about this ? about how tax cuts actually add to the deficit.

Now, me, just being a really simple guy, I always understood that you have to spend the money to add to the deficit. That taxes are a mechanism by which we, the American people, tell these 535 senators and congressmen how much money they can spend, and if they choose to go over it, that?s a spending problem, that is not a taxation problem. Am I reading that correctly?

Wiggin:?Yes, absolutely. Another way that it gets phrased that?s very curious is that they borrowed money to pay for the tax cuts, which doesn?t make any sense either. The premise of those statements is somehow it?s the government?s money first and that we didn?t cough it up in order to balance the budget.

Read the full interview here.

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Source: http://newsroom.agorafinancial.com/arnn-wiggin-breaks-down-the-national-debt/

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