I'm John Bachelor, the Constitution of the United States, Section 8, the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imports, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.

But all duties, impose, and excises shall be uniformed throughout the United States.

I welcome Thomas Savage, writing most recently at Civitas Outlook,

about that particular piece of the Constitution.

And here we are in the 21st century, celebrating 250 years of that particular piece.

And there are some necessary definitions before we get to what the problem is. I begin with the understanding in 31 U.S. that the U.S. promises to pay the

debt that it's compiling to the full faith and credit of its sovereignty. And therein

lies an additional problem. So I turn to Tom to say, thank you very much. Now that you

plunged us into this problem, the Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research,

Tom Savage, is going to get us out of trouble.

Tom, a very good evening to you.

Thank you.

The problem is debt.

It's hanging over all of us.

And the debt from the original Section 8 has been going higher and higher and higher.

Your very careful explanation is that we need to take very

careful look at this thing called GDP that makes us feel rich. How so, Tom. Good evening, too.

Good evening, John. Thanks for having me on. That particular section, their GDP gross domestic product that's the,

you know, the final goods produced in our economy. It's a decent measure, although, of course,

no measurement is perfect. It's a decent measure of our standard of living. I actually was writing

this in response to my colleague, Dave Hebert, who had said, you know,

some other metrics like say debt to interest cost ratio as well as debt to revenue. So that's

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