text: You think promoting and providing the general welfare is not in the Constitution? Is not water and sewer one of the basic human needs? We are broke because we lack the political will to pay for things when we disagree with the spending. During WWII the war effort alone was using up around 41% of GDP. Which skyrocketed the debt. We sure didn't cut taxes. We raised them to pay for the war. The top 1% were paying 90% in taxes. Is that sustainable in the long run, of course not. But we did what needed to be done to pay off the debt. The last time we had a surplus to start to pay down the debt what did we do? We cut taxes and started two wars of course. As of now we pay around 24% of GDP in taxes. Do you know what other industrial countries pay? 34%. Our GDP is roughly 16.7 trillion. Meaning if we took in taxes like other countries we would have 1.67 trillion more to be able eliminate the 584 billion deficit and have 1.09 trillion a year to to pay off the debt.