Trump's $5,000 midterm pledge could add $1 trillion to national debt, expert warns

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this is Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dunn. It's funny about really large numbers. It gets kind of absurd the more you think about their quantity, like $1 million in 20s weighs over 100 pounds, or 1 billion seconds is almost 32 years, and a trillion? Forget about it. But a sum of more than $1 trillion is what it would cost our nation if President Trump actually followed through with his pledge to grant every adult American $5,000 to vote Republican in the midterms. Today on the show, you'll hear from a national organization, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, about how this pledge could explode our economy, but also about how politicians on both sides of the aisle are not taking our debt seriously enough. Then, at the end of the show, our own reporter will get us up to speed on the new proposed behavioral health facility in Springfield. In our current era, life imitating art is kind of standard. I can remember an old Saturday Night Live skit where the late, great Phil Hartman playing billionaire Sam Walton looked into a camera and pledged to America that if they voted against a tax on billionaires, he would pay them all $100,000 each. Of course, it was parody, but as we all know, President Trump just did something very much like this spoof, asking all adults to vote Republican in the midterms, of which he'd then pay them $5,000. Today on the show, an organization that advocates for responsible federal spending isn't laughing, and we talk with their leader now. Maya McGinnis, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Maya, thank you so much for taking some time out to talk with us.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, let's start really easy. Can you explain what your organization is and what you do?

Sure. The Nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has a board of directors of folks who have been in the trenches on budgeting, who've run a lot of the different agencies and budget committees. And it's an organization that is not about politics. It's just focused on fiscal responsibility. And I should kind of clarify that that doesn't mean balancing the budget every single year, but it means looking at ways to control our national debt, because while debt isn't always a bad thing, sometimes it makes sense to borrow. This country has become dependent on borrowing and is borrowing in emergency times, which makes sense, but also good economic times or even inflationary times, which definitely does not make sense. So we try to put some countervailing pressure on lawmakers to be more responsible in how they budget.

Okay. And then just to level set, what is our current budget deficit, how we got here, and maybe explain how economically precarious that can be.

Yeah, sure. So we borrow about $2 trillion a year. Our budget is roughly $7.5 trillion. We take in about five and a half trillion in taxes, and that leaves us with a $2 trillion gap. That is something that we have to borrow. The way the government borrows is by issuing treasuries, bills, bonds, and notes. And those are things that people who are saving money buy them. They're great to have in your financial portfolio. But they are also a