The benefits of the spending reductions

 Daily Torch:

“[P]olitically that would be great for us, you know, it gives everybody a check. But if you think about our core principles, right, fiscal responsibility is what we do as conservatives. That’s our brand. And we have a $36 trillion federal debt, we have a giant deficit that we’re contending with. I think we need to pay down the credit card, right?”

That was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) response on Feb. 20 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to a proposal by President Donald Trump to use 20 percent of savings from any spending reductions derived from identifying waste, fraud and abuse by the White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the U.S. Treasury to pay so-called DOGE dividends to taxpayers.

Under the proposal, another 20 percent would be used to paying off the national debt and the remaining 60 percent would be rolled into the following year’s budget to reduce the deficit substantially.

Hypothetically, under Trump’s proposal, if $1 trillion were saved through the one-time cuts, $600 billion would be used for deficit reduction for Fiscal Year 2026, $200 billion to paying down the debt and $200 billion sent back to taxpayers.

What this might do is give taxpayers a vested interest in such spending reductions, since it would mean they would get some say about how the money might have been better spent, Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning noted in a statement, but that Johnson was generally right that reducing the debt is still the greater priority.

“Speaker Johnson is 100 percent correct in prioritizing ending deficit spending and then paying down the debt with the DOGE dividend. It is easy in Washington, D.C. to spend money on all sorts of good ideas and President Trump is right that the government was wasting the people’s money. However, there are 36 trillion reasons why focusing on ending the deficit and reducing inflation have to be job one, two and three,” Manning said.
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Deciding to reduce your debt can have immediate benefits.  I did it a few years ago by selling off some property and using the proceeds to pay off much of my debt.  It certainly made my life much easier.