The Washington financier who first proposed creation of a trust
fund to retire the national debt has written a book outlining a new
plan that would prevent Congress from raiding the fund to
supplement the cost of regular government programs. In 1982 he
suggested a temporary 5% tax on manufacturers sales. The income
would go into a debt trust fund similar to the highway trust fund.
The $1 trillion federal debt would have been retired in five years
(by 1985 or 1986) under that proposal. In the past decade, however,
federal trust fund have not fared as well. For example,
contributions to the social security fund essentially are borrowed
for the regular budget. The trust fund contains federal I.O.U.s. A
special tax that raised secure funds exclusively for debt
retirement might well get public support. Without federal interest
payments, the 1992 federal deficit would have been cut to $114
billion from $314 billion.
Washington banker and attorney Charles W. Steadman, who made the
1982 proposal, now has eliminated the trust fund from his method of
paying off the debt. In "The National Debt Conclusion: Establishing
the Debt Repayment Plan," (Praeger Publishers, November 1993),
Steadman lays out his proposal to eliminate the debt in ten years.
Steadman would issue new debt bonds for existing federal government
debt securities in a single exchange. A sales tax at the producers'
level would be dedicated solely to paying off the new debt bonds on
schedule. There would be no trust fund. The rate of the sales tax
would be scheduled to raise only enough money each year to call the
bonds scheduled for retirement in that year. The debt bonds could
be retired only by income from the special purpose tax. Steadman's
plan establishes a contract between the government and the
bondholders, who would have no claim on general funds of the United
States. The Congress would have no way to borrow from the debt
retirement receipts. Steadman argues that America must adopt a
fundamentally different fiscal structure before the debt burden
ultimately causes collapse of the nation's financial structure.
General
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