By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

At the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith Friday, more than 220 college students, including sophomore Garrett Spain from Greenwood, tried to do what Congress is unwilling to do – get the government’s debt under control.

The students gathered at two dozen tables, each with a laptop, and worked together using the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s (CRFB) Debt Fixer tool. That’s an online resource that lets users see how the federal budget would be affected by selecting various spending cuts and tax increases.

The goal of Friday’s exercise was not to pay down the $21.6 trillion national debt. Instead, it was to get the red ink under control. The $15.8 trillion public debt (what the government owes everyone but itself) is 77 percent of the gross domestic product and growing rapidly. By 2028, it is projected to be 97 percent, meaning it will be the same size as the economy. The goal for the students was to stabilize it at 70 percent by 2028, and 40 percent by 2050.

The event began with CRFB’s chief of staff, Mike Murphy, describing the basics of the federal budget, and then students had 40 minutes to try to reach those goals. That’s not much time, but it did introduce them to how the government spends taxpayers’ money. It also reinforced the reality that tradeoffs are unavoidable. Because students were working together, they had to come to consensus – not a bad lesson to learn for the adult world.

First National Bank of Fort Smith sponsored the event. Its president and CEO, Sam Sicard, has pleaded with Arkansas’ congressional delegation to act on this issue for years, to no avail. In December, Congress cut taxes, and then it followed that action this year by increasing spending. That combination did help spur the economy, but it also further borrowed from the future. Partly as a result, next year the government is projected to spend $1 trillion more than it collects. When the economy inevitably goes into a recession, the deficits will grow.

So after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Congress to act in young people’s interest, Sicard decided to go to the young people themselves. The event attracted the large crowd, he said, with “Free pizza, free T-shirts, and a lot of help from UA-Fort Smith.” Some professors counted it as class time.

Seventeen of the 24 tables reached the 70 percent goal by 2028, while 15 reached the 40 percent goal by 2050. One table paid off the debt entirely by then. The most popular choice (92 percent) was reducing prescription drug costs through several policy changes, which the Debt Fixer says would save $230 billion by 2028. Second was ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a choice of 88 percent of the tables, which would save $440 billion. All but one of the tables increased tax revenues somehow, and that one didn’t meet either target.

Spain’s table reduced the public debt to 70 percent of the gross domestic product by 2028 and 37 percent by 2050. The students didn’t have much time and weren’t familiar with some of the terms, but they were earnestly participating.

Spain, 19, said the exercise was about making tradeoffs. If you want programs, you have to pay for them. But if you increase taxes, people have less incentive to work. A balance has to be found between stimulating the economy, the social benefits of programs, and “countless” other factors. Given more time, he said, the students would have made different choices.

“I do not know what the solution is, but there is most definitely a problem,” he wrote in an email. “I hope that events like ours today continue to open the eyes of the younger generation since we are the upcoming leaders of our country.”

Want to see if you can fix the debt? Go to www.crfb.org/debtfixer. You might even get some people together and order some pizzas. It seemed to work for the college students.