The rhetoric of "excess national spending and national debt" has become a source of extreme austerity and budgetary gridlock. Currently (11/15/17) it appears the source of yet another Senate attempt to cut subsidies for Obamacare.The eventual cost is estimated to be millions of poor Americans left unable to afford health care insurance. This is supposed to "free up" $300 billion for tax cuts. It remains a stubborn fact that lack of health care insurance is associated with shorter life spans. To take away such a dedicated entitlement is, thus, with foresight, to relegate to shorter life spans an estimated 13 million poor Americans. That's why it's horrendously morally repugnant!
America faces multiple extreme emergencies, smaller to global: hurricane relief and redevelopment, health care insurance, and sped-up global climate change. In the past, when Americans faced such crises (the Revolution and the War of Secession) they empowered their government by creating United States Notes ("greenbacks") without taking these dollars from earned income by taxation. Republicans, who created them, spent as needed to prevail over the emergencies. There was some inflation for a while but the people did not starve to death nor did the country blow up, or dry up and blow away.
It's been taboo, so far, but President Trump once showed awareness of this. Congress has Constitutional authority, (Article 1 Section 8,) to create money. He pointed out, in another context (May 10, 2016, CNN) that "you [the government] just print[s] the money."
So how about President Trump proposing to Congress, just as an experiment, that it temporarily bypass the Federal Reserve and create, electronically, the $300 billion U.S. Notes needed without destroying health care subsidies for 13 million poor Americans? Take it from House Financial Services Committee table, H.R. 2990 orf 2011, The NEED Act.
