Ideas to pay back the US national debt

…that don’t involve raising taxes on billionaires.

“President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size.”
—Two billionaires in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal

We’re concerned that the country is hurtling toward a debt default—that we’re spending too much on things we don’t need. However, we believe with the right plan we can avoid financial catastrophe. These are our ideas for paying back the US national debt that don’t involve raising taxes on billionaires.

A Car Wash
There are over 280 million cars in the United States. With the US national debt at just over twenty-eight trillion dollars, all we would need to do is hold a giant car wash and charge . . . one thousand dollars per car. And hey, the more cars we all keep buying, the less those car washes will cost. A chicken in every pot and ten cars in every driveway. It’s simple math, folks.

Pay Teachers Less
We can all agree that teachers make too much money for merely educating, understanding, advising, and caring for the country’s youth and our collective future. If we pay them less, perhaps that will incentivize them to get summer jobs, like handwashing 280 million cars. They can’t keep the money, though—we need that cash for our plan to work.

Open a Bunch of New Credit Cards and Do a Balance Transfer
The great thing about this idea is that it will get us a lot of points. We can lower our interest rate and get the Sandals honeymoon suite for half off at the same time!

Use the “Snowball Method”
This is a classic debt-reduction strategy where we pay off our smallest debt first—which, in our case, is apparently also our largest debt. Because we have one single enormous debt. So now that we’re seeing this on the page, it looks like it might not work.

Sell Our Museums
We’ve got a bunch of buildings that contain the rarest, most expensive art in the world. Half of it we stole got for free! Why are we just keeping it all there, not to be sold? So that everyone who’s anyone can look at it? We should be selling that stuff right off the walls to the highest bidder. We’ve got plenty of friends who would love to own the MoMA—and change the locks.

Start an OnlyFans
This would give paying subscribers what they want: government, stripped down. (Not naked, just incredibly understaffed.)

Start an MLM and Turn It into a Pyramid Scheme
Let’s design a bunch of overpriced beauty products and Amway this thing!

Make Children Work
What are kids doing all day? Whatever they’re doing, they’re clearly not contributing enough economic value. It’s time for children to start making use of all our empty office space.

Host a Twitch Stream
We recently found out about Twitch, and we’re still not exactly sure what it is, but we’re pretty sure we can make some quick cash if we slap some VR goggles on the president and watch him play Quiplash.

Refinance the White House
Have we done this before? We should definitely do this.

Go on eBay and Flip a Pencil for a Pen for a Toaster for an iPad for a Stand Mixer for a Couch for an Old Car for a New Car for an RV for a House for a Mansion, Then Sell It
And right there, we’ll have paid off . . . one one-millionth of the national debt.

Sneak into Someone’s Will
Not one of ours. But someone’s.

Spend One Crazy Night in Vegas
We take all the money in the Fed, drive to a Las Vegas casino, and bet everything on red.

Kickstarter
We should’ve done one of these back in 1776. Never too late! Reward tiers can include getting your name added to the Declaration of Independence.

Take a Bunch of Stuff from the National Archives and Bring It on Antiques Roadshow
We’d have to first listen to them drone on and on about how this copy of the Constitution has been beautifully preserved yada yada yada, but then we’d get a great valuation.

Consider the above options and let us know which seem most feasible. Please remember that we’re not open to the simple fix of forcing the country’s wealthiest residents to pay their fair share. Some of us are very wealthy and don’t want to do that. This is your problem that we created, not the other way around.

---

Today’s newsletter was adapted from a piece in my debut essay collection This Won’t Help, which is on sale right now:

---

Q&A

Q: You don’t think billionaires deserve to keep their money?

A: It’s not their money.

Q: Whose is it?

A: Yours. It’s your money.

Q: How’d they get my money.

A: By doing anything other than paying their fair share of taxes.

Q: They pay plenty of taxes.

A: Not nearly enough, and not as much as they pay their executives. Take this, for instance, from a report between 2018 and 2022 featured in The New Republic:

“During the five years of the study, Tesla took home $4.4 billion in profits as CEO Elon Musk carted off $2.28 billion in stock options, which, since his 2018 payday, have ballooned to nearly $56 billion... Tesla has, during that same period of time, paid an effective tax rate of zero percent through a combination of carrying forward losses from unprofitable years and good old-fashioned offshore tax dodging.”

Q: But why don’t you think billionaires deserve to keep their money?

A: Are you serious, Derek? I… I just explained that.

---

My book This Won’t Help is on sale right now. Buy it in bulk.

My debut essay collection This Won’t Help is on sale right now on Amazon
(even I can’t escape the billionaires) and has free shipping at Bookshop.org

Read it already? Leave a (honest-but-full-of-endless praise) review

This Won’t Help was a Foreword INDIES Gold winner in humor and landed on The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 list. But institutions aren’t people — people are people. (At least, they were before Citizens United.) If you liked This Won’t Help, you can give big middle finger to Citizens United and go leave the best review you can muster over on Amazon and Goodreads.

Here’s what some folks have said about This Won’t Help: