And who's going to hold the US responsible for repayment? Way I see it, US has the power to just tell any creditor that they won't be repaying, whether through structuring it as some economic package or just straight up saying go suck it. The former's been done before (1933); maybe eventually we'll see the latter, if a nation has the balls to ask. And talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool.
Yes, some sort of technical default is likely in a few decades. I expect that when debt payments become unsustainable the government will force bondholders to exchange their holdings with new bonds that have the same nominal face value but longer maturity and artificially low interest rates. The next step will be legislation that forces all retirement accounts such as 401(k) to purchase Treasury bonds for "safety".
If you are American, then it is you, for the most part.
Most of the US government debt is owed to institution and people in the US. All these retirement funds, social security, health insurance, etc... that own part of the government debt... well, you won't get what you paid for.
This is a simplistic and partial view, but I think that's the most personal way of thinking about it.
That’s about it. You’re paying for roads and education and war with your retirement savings. There’s not really anyone else there to pick up the bill. There’d better be some kind of return on that investment so you can actually retire.
Printing more money devalues the currency your retirement is priced in, so that’s not an escape either.
A country that controls its currency can always bail itself out of all debt by printing all that money. Now they would destroy their whole economy in the process because of inflation and countries being mad about a country doing that. If they don't pay and default they kind of also piss everyone off and that makes the curency rates fall as well. In that case they would repay as much as they want really, the price for not doing that is economy strengt. The dollar could lose the global currency status either way, fun!
You’re the only one in the thread that gets any of this right. But: Monetizing the debt is replacing one asset (treasuries eg) that pays interest with a nominally equal asset that doesn’t (US dollar). How does that spur inflation? It’s a reduction in income over time. How does paying back our debt IN FULL hurt our credit worthiness?
Money is special because it’s the only asset that can be used to purchase goods and services. If I have a pile of 10 year Treasury bonds worth $500, and I want to buy a TV, I have to first convince someone with $500 in cash that they’d rather have my bonds than buy their own TV.
It operates under expectations - the more liquid the asset, the more likely you'll be OK with accepting it in the context of a trade. The discount is for illiquidity.
Every single administration since the turn of the century, regardless of party, has run a deficit. It's clear that if we want fiscal responsibility (and I do, very much), we can't look to either of the major parties for it. Unfortunately the chances of that are low at best, and on top of that it's not actually very popular to do what is needed to balance the budget. The cold hard reality is that we will need to both raise taxes and cut spending to balance the budget, but lots of people are ideologically opposed to one or both of those things. And even if they aren't, there's no agreement on how to implement said tax hikes/budget cuts. It's a pretty grim situation.
It's helpful to avoid "both sides"-ing, or abandoning all hope.
Clinton through 2001 - ended with a 1.2% GDP surplus
Bush through 2009 - ended with a 9.8% GDP deficit
Obama through 2017 - ended with a 3.4% GDP deficit
Trump through 2021 - ended with a 12.3% GDP deficit
Biden through 2025 - ended with a 5.9% GDP deficit
Trump now - running even higher, though final data isn't yet available.
There's a clear pattern available, where one party reliably leaves makes the situation worse, and the other party reliably makes the situation better. The fact that Democrats cannot undo all of the massive damage done by each Republican administration does not mean "both sides" are the same.
If you want third parties to win, they realistically need to start with local elections, so they can gain momentum and take the spot of one of the majors. (also helpful to get rid of FTTP voting in as many elections as possible).
We're seeing great success with local democratic socialists, who keep showing that government can be a force for good, it can be improved, and it can be done without blowing budgets. It's a promising start, and it's clearly threatening Dems and the GOP alike.
"Abandoning" all hope implies a choice. I never chose to have every last shred of hope and optimism I had forcibly ripped from me and stomped into the dirt by these scumbags we call "leaders" (and their idiot cultists). When will humanity learn that the types of people who become billionaires and trillionaires literally want us all dead? At this point they appear to also want themselves dead too, but it's all gonna be okay in the end, because one of them gets to die last with all the money, thereby "winning" the game.
I mean, there's fiscally responsible but the welfare department is never gonna make money at the end of the day spending is a political football. Trump's ICE got $10 billion, because what? So now in addition to DEA we have ICE and the TSA, and well, we can't un spend that money and shut them down so, well, shit.
ICE got $75 billion, with $45 billion of that allocated for concentration camps. And somebody's got to build those camps and supply them, and their CEOs are all buddies with Trump.
Financially ledger is just a social construct; the IOUs of the past are never paid off as they never mattered.
Finance shit just keeps innumerates and those ignorant of physics believing wild end of the universe theories.
For more look up Debt jubilee's; humans wiped the debt of the dead off the books and no black holes opened within the sun, no gods descended from Olympus and slaughtered the children
Fucking mesmerizing how its not just MAGA nutters obsessed with old spoken and written finance traditions; different semantics than religion but same goal of kowtowing the proletariat.
This site helps propagate such paranoias with the tilt it has towards startup funding and yada yada. Smartest engineers I have ever worked with earned PhDs designing experiments for Tevatron and working on NASA satellites. We often had a laugh at how such social hacks dupe so many wannabe smart and educated people.
On the contrary startup genius software engineers are easily duped by social hacks.
> Republican presidents added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913.
> Democratic presidents have added a total of $18 trillion to the national debt since 1913 (adjusted for inflation), while Republicans have added $17.3 trillion
So everyone downvoting and flagging people saying it's a problem with both parties should be ashamed. Tribalism is stupid.
No, republicans have always raised spending more than democrats. They just have no impulse control, and only worry about the budget when a Democrat is in charge.
What's the difference? Everyone involved has been completely reckless with the debt. You think a democrat will somehow stop spending? Both parties are super happy to drive the car off the cliff
Don't bother, Republicans are the only ones that care about the debt and their ideology makes them incapable of realizing there very choice of candidates is the exact problem
Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.
You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.
I don't actually. I paid the last of my monthly student loan payments off in 2013 when I was an ex-pat. The rest had long ago fell off my credit report. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places.
I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008.
Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
"Why u surprised, bro? Project 2025, duh!" meme needs to die, it's a lazy answer. You know full well what OP is talking about. Where's the $2 gasoline? Why does the debt keep going up with the party of fiscal restraint in charge? No more foreign wars, eh? Etc. There's nothing wrong with reminding folks what was said on the campaign stump.
No, I disagree. The reason I bring up project 2025 is because we knew this would happen. The actions this administration is taking are exactly what people who were paying attention said they would do.
Why does this matter? Because anyone claiming "this isn't what I voted for" is lying. They weren't tricked, they weren't deceived by his alluring words, they made a choice knowing what the consequences would be. And now that the consequences are here, they want to cry and pretend like they didn't know. Like a child touching a hot stove.
The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in, I didn't see Trump go on Rogan with a folder called Project 2025 and read through it with him and discuss the real plans outlined in the book.
There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
> The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in
It seemed this way because it was so obviously outrageous. Well, here we are... not outrageous now.
But it was never a conspiracy. The Heritage Foundation is the largest Conservative think-tank in America. They basically write GOP policy and have been for decades. They're not some tiny group of weirdos. They guided basically all of the policy change during the Reagan administration. You know? Ronald Reagan? The blueprint of the modern GOP? Yeah, he didn't come up with that. The Heritage Foundation did.
> The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in, I didn't see Trump go on Rogan with a folder called Project 2025 and read through it with him and discuss the real plans outlined in the book.
And in 2016, I may have been sympathetic to this argument. By the time 2024 had rolled around, we had already endured the trainwreck of his first administration, his failures while handling covid, several dozen other major scandals, oh and that insurrection he attempted on January 6th.
So I have no sympathy for anyone who claims they believed what he promised. None whatsoever.
> There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
Look, ultimately here is where I disagree: I am not willing to give any of his supporters the benefit of the doubt anymore. I don't believe for a second that they thought he would cut spending or get the debt down or whatever - he didn't even try in his first term, why would his second be different? Pointing at his promises like they believed them is just giving them cover for their own choices.
> The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
This, we agree on. I personally believe most of his supporters voted for him specifically for the violence and pain he is inflicting on people. That's the only part of his platform that has been consistent, and it's the only part that has been delivered. Ultimately, that is what his voters want and support. They want to hurt their fellow citizens because they hate them. Whether that traces back to decades of Fox News, "economic grievances", whatever, it doesn't matter.
Unlimited spending will never cease as both parties are heavily incentivized to spend, pork barrel and defer desperately needed reform.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
This is correct yet also obscures an important point.
The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true.
I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one who cuts the waste.
The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.
You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy.
This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
Biden's infra plan was $550bn in new spending, which was offset in only $50bn of new revenue and $110bn of spending reductions. So, on net, it was massively inflationary and toasted the budget.
According to any of the reporting I can find, the Inflation Reduction Act: "This bill would raise $737 billion in revenue while spending $437 billion. The remaining $300 billion would go toward deficit reduction." [0]
This is pretty much the same story with every major policy proposal from the Biden administration. They all included plans to cover the expected costs.
The “spending floodgates” have not materially changed direction in any of the last four administrations. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, debt service and the military. Besides those five factors everything else is only a quarter of national spending and I think you will find if you look that those other categories don’t move around from admin to admin as much as you might think either.
Clinton made a serious effort to pay down the debt, but none of the Democrats since did.
Clinton was also not a Democrat if you compare him to current Democrats. His admin was more right wing than the Trump administration. Clinton's crime bill, serious immigration crackdowns. I mean, Trump did partial criminal justice reform in his first term. That's the complete opposite of the Clinton crime bill, which skyrocketed incarceration.
Clinton's IIRAIRA bill laid out the blueprint currently being utilized for rapid deportations. In fact, 'expedited removal' is a core feature of the bill. Also, he architected the concept of administrative warrants currently being used by ICE for deportations.
By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground.
I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
> I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat.
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
"Talk" and "Walk" aren't the same word although they rhyme. And they only refer to Democrats, who are the only ones with agency in government (Murc's Law).
When they engage in financial conservation it's cover for destroying programs they don't like. The fact that they are cheering on yet another incredibly stupid, expensive, and pointless war proves that they are not "fiscal conservatives."
New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral, the electorate will be angry they don't have cake (unless the taxes are applied disproportionally to the top income and wealth percentiles), and we'll be right back to irresponsible policy. I don't have much hope for the US, but at least the bond market are the adults in the room currently. Congrats to those who strip mined the country successfully.
I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses.
I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?
Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....
The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. It can be paid back, you just have to go after it. It's a choice not to. Forward curves go up because we choose to not reduce the debt? All consumer borrowing costs go up accordingly (consumer debt and mortgages are priced off of US treasuries)? A crisis occurs and there isn't any borrowing capacity left to get to the other side? Sucks to suck, try to suck less in the future. Natural consequences are an important component of the learning process.
Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible.
The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports.
That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
The Democrats have, in the past forty years, been the only party to have consistently been able to reduce the deficit, even creating a surplus by the end of Clinton's presidency.
They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]
Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.
This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.
The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.
The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees."
When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.
That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
Correct. It's also often forgotten how much the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) had done to make government more streamlined and efficient between 1993 and 1998. That took care of pretty much all the low-hanging fruit that those behind DOGE falsely believed was still there.
This isn't a refutation or even an argument. If something was obviously incorrect, you would think it would be trivial to prove wrong. But, evidently not.
The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally.
The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
The Department of Defense has never received a clean opinion on a full financial audit. Since starting comprehensive yearly reviews in 2018, the Pentagon has failed eight consecutive enterprise-wide audits due to scale, missing records, and untrackable assets.
The only propaganda I see here is coming from those who are so out of touch of reality that they firmly believe there's a chunk of the uniparty that doesn't increase the deficit.
When things are monitored to such a degree that a startup I was at couldn't bring doughnuts to a meeting because NASA was gonna there and that could possibly be a bribe, I don't know about efficient, but there's a reason why DOGE couldn't really find any waste.
It really already did lose its reserve status, in a manner of speaking. There isn't ever going to be a gold standard again (even if there is, would the actual gold have the sort of real life uses it had when the gold standard was around? Not like people fill teeth with it anymore unless you are some sort of thug).
The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.
How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?
The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans.
If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.
But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.
There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.
Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
Don't forget the part where you then direct the DOJ to arrest and prosecute citizens inspecting the botched repair to THEIR POOL(as in the people's pool) so everyone in the admin can CYA and save face.
> Ten years ago, the debt level was at $19.4 trillion.
$80 trillion if it doubles again in 10 years.
That's not how debt works. It would be way more than $80 trillion.
And they spent it all on healthcare, public housing and high speed rail right?
The media should report the number that actually matters: debt to GDP ratio. It’s quite high as well, but it’s the more meaningful number.
What if we viewed national debt like CPI? It’s not that it’s ridiculously higher now, it’s that money works differently now.
What used do seem implausible is now accepted as normal, and tough luck if your income and wealth fell behind / didn’t keep pace.
They need to cut your taxes and raise everyone elses.
The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice.
> The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice.
Infinitely more credible than either of our current parties at this point.
And who's going to hold the US responsible for repayment? Way I see it, US has the power to just tell any creditor that they won't be repaying, whether through structuring it as some economic package or just straight up saying go suck it. The former's been done before (1933); maybe eventually we'll see the latter, if a nation has the balls to ask. And talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool.
Yes, some sort of technical default is likely in a few decades. I expect that when debt payments become unsustainable the government will force bondholders to exchange their holdings with new bonds that have the same nominal face value but longer maturity and artificially low interest rates. The next step will be legislation that forces all retirement accounts such as 401(k) to purchase Treasury bonds for "safety".
> US has the power to just tell any creditor that they won't be repaying
To think about it, we have the perfect president who has been telling creditors to go pound sand for decades: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/...
> talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool.
Until the pool runs out of funding to do to replace the evaporated water.
I am ignorant. If they don't pay, who will charge it if the default?
If you are American, then it is you, for the most part.
Most of the US government debt is owed to institution and people in the US. All these retirement funds, social security, health insurance, etc... that own part of the government debt... well, you won't get what you paid for.
This is a simplistic and partial view, but I think that's the most personal way of thinking about it.
That’s about it. You’re paying for roads and education and war with your retirement savings. There’s not really anyone else there to pick up the bill. There’d better be some kind of return on that investment so you can actually retire.
Printing more money devalues the currency your retirement is priced in, so that’s not an escape either.
A country that controls its currency can always bail itself out of all debt by printing all that money. Now they would destroy their whole economy in the process because of inflation and countries being mad about a country doing that. If they don't pay and default they kind of also piss everyone off and that makes the curency rates fall as well. In that case they would repay as much as they want really, the price for not doing that is economy strengt. The dollar could lose the global currency status either way, fun!
Inflation doesn't really capture what would happen.
Debasement is the appropriate term.
The US citizens hold the majority of the debt so if the government default the people's savings and pension funds evaporate.
It's literally impossible to default as you can simply emit new money and buy back the debt or pay the interest with the minted money.
Of course this comes with its own set of gigantic issues, likely triple digit inflation and hardship to raise money for generations.
But US can't default really.
Ofc the US can default and it will most likely in the event.
Debasement is far more painful - the treasury will simply choose not to come good on the obligations.
You’re the only one in the thread that gets any of this right. But: Monetizing the debt is replacing one asset (treasuries eg) that pays interest with a nominally equal asset that doesn’t (US dollar). How does that spur inflation? It’s a reduction in income over time. How does paying back our debt IN FULL hurt our credit worthiness?
Money is special because it’s the only asset that can be used to purchase goods and services. If I have a pile of 10 year Treasury bonds worth $500, and I want to buy a TV, I have to first convince someone with $500 in cash that they’d rather have my bonds than buy their own TV.
No thats not true.
It operates under expectations - the more liquid the asset, the more likely you'll be OK with accepting it in the context of a trade. The discount is for illiquidity.
> No thats not true.
I'd love to see someone buy a TV with those bonds.
> But US can't default really.
It could. We'd just reorganize and call the old debts part of "Old US". This is all "New US".
And that New US Dollar as a global currency? Not likely.
I guess it’s time to elect a couple democrats to curb the deficit while solving the impending social collapse.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen this time.
Every single administration since the turn of the century, regardless of party, has run a deficit. It's clear that if we want fiscal responsibility (and I do, very much), we can't look to either of the major parties for it. Unfortunately the chances of that are low at best, and on top of that it's not actually very popular to do what is needed to balance the budget. The cold hard reality is that we will need to both raise taxes and cut spending to balance the budget, but lots of people are ideologically opposed to one or both of those things. And even if they aren't, there's no agreement on how to implement said tax hikes/budget cuts. It's a pretty grim situation.
It's helpful to avoid "both sides"-ing, or abandoning all hope.
Clinton through 2001 - ended with a 1.2% GDP surplus
Bush through 2009 - ended with a 9.8% GDP deficit
Obama through 2017 - ended with a 3.4% GDP deficit
Trump through 2021 - ended with a 12.3% GDP deficit
Biden through 2025 - ended with a 5.9% GDP deficit
Trump now - running even higher, though final data isn't yet available.
There's a clear pattern available, where one party reliably leaves makes the situation worse, and the other party reliably makes the situation better. The fact that Democrats cannot undo all of the massive damage done by each Republican administration does not mean "both sides" are the same.
If you want third parties to win, they realistically need to start with local elections, so they can gain momentum and take the spot of one of the majors. (also helpful to get rid of FTTP voting in as many elections as possible).
We're seeing great success with local democratic socialists, who keep showing that government can be a force for good, it can be improved, and it can be done without blowing budgets. It's a promising start, and it's clearly threatening Dems and the GOP alike.
> ...or abandoning all hope.
"Abandoning" all hope implies a choice. I never chose to have every last shred of hope and optimism I had forcibly ripped from me and stomped into the dirt by these scumbags we call "leaders" (and their idiot cultists). When will humanity learn that the types of people who become billionaires and trillionaires literally want us all dead? At this point they appear to also want themselves dead too, but it's all gonna be okay in the end, because one of them gets to die last with all the money, thereby "winning" the game.
I mean, there's fiscally responsible but the welfare department is never gonna make money at the end of the day spending is a political football. Trump's ICE got $10 billion, because what? So now in addition to DEA we have ICE and the TSA, and well, we can't un spend that money and shut them down so, well, shit.
ICE got $75 billion, with $45 billion of that allocated for concentration camps. And somebody's got to build those camps and supply them, and their CEOs are all buddies with Trump.
Financially ledger is just a social construct; the IOUs of the past are never paid off as they never mattered.
Finance shit just keeps innumerates and those ignorant of physics believing wild end of the universe theories.
For more look up Debt jubilee's; humans wiped the debt of the dead off the books and no black holes opened within the sun, no gods descended from Olympus and slaughtered the children
Fucking mesmerizing how its not just MAGA nutters obsessed with old spoken and written finance traditions; different semantics than religion but same goal of kowtowing the proletariat.
This site helps propagate such paranoias with the tilt it has towards startup funding and yada yada. Smartest engineers I have ever worked with earned PhDs designing experiments for Tevatron and working on NASA satellites. We often had a laugh at how such social hacks dupe so many wannabe smart and educated people.
On the contrary startup genius software engineers are easily duped by social hacks.
Occasionally countries do default on debt. It doesn't go well.
Life is the leading cause of death
> Life is the leading cause of death
100% fatality rate thus far...
US Treasuries happen to be a significant part of many peoples retirement savings. So I think your hot take is pretty uninformed.
"Oh yeah; whattabout this other social illusion. Checkmate atheists."
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So, I am assuming you are native?
I think they are commenting on the OP being in Ireland
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the history has demonstrated these are Republican problems.
Democrats are shit for other things, but not for fisical stupidity like cutting taxes and rasing spending.
Why does nobody post references anymore!? These are simple facts that nobody should be arguing about.
https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-ha...
> Republican presidents added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913.
> Democratic presidents have added a total of $18 trillion to the national debt since 1913 (adjusted for inflation), while Republicans have added $17.3 trillion
So everyone downvoting and flagging people saying it's a problem with both parties should be ashamed. Tribalism is stupid.
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No, republicans have always raised spending more than democrats. They just have no impulse control, and only worry about the budget when a Democrat is in charge.
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this is a fact you can look up
I don't understand that at all. The deficit has been running rampant ever since Clinton left office. Both sides spent with reckless abandon.
Trump, 1st term, added 24% of GDP worth of debt.
That's more or less the same number of Obama and Bush, but they served two terms each.
In his second term, he's already added 11% in a record 19 months.
What's the difference? Everyone involved has been completely reckless with the debt. You think a democrat will somehow stop spending? Both parties are super happy to drive the car off the cliff
They just told you what the difference is.
There is no practical difference. Both parties are glad to drive the car off a cliff
Don't bother, Republicans are the only ones that care about the debt and their ideology makes them incapable of realizing there very choice of candidates is the exact problem
brought to you by the "party of fiscal responsibility"
Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.
You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.
I don't actually. I paid the last of my monthly student loan payments off in 2013 when I was an ex-pat. The rest had long ago fell off my credit report. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places.
I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008.
Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
This admin has done basically the opposite of everything it said it would do…who could’ve guessed?
What? Basically everything they’ve done was laid out in project 2025. The people who voted for this were warned about exactly what has happened.
"Why u surprised, bro? Project 2025, duh!" meme needs to die, it's a lazy answer. You know full well what OP is talking about. Where's the $2 gasoline? Why does the debt keep going up with the party of fiscal restraint in charge? No more foreign wars, eh? Etc. There's nothing wrong with reminding folks what was said on the campaign stump.
Why remind people of the lies? We all knew they were lies. And the people who believed the lies will not have their minds changed
There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base
No, I disagree. The reason I bring up project 2025 is because we knew this would happen. The actions this administration is taking are exactly what people who were paying attention said they would do.
Why does this matter? Because anyone claiming "this isn't what I voted for" is lying. They weren't tricked, they weren't deceived by his alluring words, they made a choice knowing what the consequences would be. And now that the consequences are here, they want to cry and pretend like they didn't know. Like a child touching a hot stove.
The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in, I didn't see Trump go on Rogan with a folder called Project 2025 and read through it with him and discuss the real plans outlined in the book.
There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
> The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in
It seemed this way because it was so obviously outrageous. Well, here we are... not outrageous now.
But it was never a conspiracy. The Heritage Foundation is the largest Conservative think-tank in America. They basically write GOP policy and have been for decades. They're not some tiny group of weirdos. They guided basically all of the policy change during the Reagan administration. You know? Ronald Reagan? The blueprint of the modern GOP? Yeah, he didn't come up with that. The Heritage Foundation did.
> The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in, I didn't see Trump go on Rogan with a folder called Project 2025 and read through it with him and discuss the real plans outlined in the book.
And in 2016, I may have been sympathetic to this argument. By the time 2024 had rolled around, we had already endured the trainwreck of his first administration, his failures while handling covid, several dozen other major scandals, oh and that insurrection he attempted on January 6th.
So I have no sympathy for anyone who claims they believed what he promised. None whatsoever.
> There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
Look, ultimately here is where I disagree: I am not willing to give any of his supporters the benefit of the doubt anymore. I don't believe for a second that they thought he would cut spending or get the debt down or whatever - he didn't even try in his first term, why would his second be different? Pointing at his promises like they believed them is just giving them cover for their own choices.
> The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
This, we agree on. I personally believe most of his supporters voted for him specifically for the violence and pain he is inflicting on people. That's the only part of his platform that has been consistent, and it's the only part that has been delivered. Ultimately, that is what his voters want and support. They want to hurt their fellow citizens because they hate them. Whether that traces back to decades of Fox News, "economic grievances", whatever, it doesn't matter.
Unlimited spending will never cease as both parties are heavily incentivized to spend, pork barrel and defer desperately needed reform.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
This is correct yet also obscures an important point.
The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true.
I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one who cuts the waste.
The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.
You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy.
This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
Biden's infra plan was $550bn in new spending, which was offset in only $50bn of new revenue and $110bn of spending reductions. So, on net, it was massively inflationary and toasted the budget.
That was just one proposal with half a trillion.
Would you care to provide a citation for that?
According to any of the reporting I can find, the Inflation Reduction Act: "This bill would raise $737 billion in revenue while spending $437 billion. The remaining $300 billion would go toward deficit reduction." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan#Inflati...
This is pretty much the same story with every major policy proposal from the Biden administration. They all included plans to cover the expected costs.
The “spending floodgates” have not materially changed direction in any of the last four administrations. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, debt service and the military. Besides those five factors everything else is only a quarter of national spending and I think you will find if you look that those other categories don’t move around from admin to admin as much as you might think either.
The spending floodgates have been reduced in the past. Under democratic presidents.
Clinton made a serious effort to pay down the debt, but none of the Democrats since did.
Clinton was also not a Democrat if you compare him to current Democrats. His admin was more right wing than the Trump administration. Clinton's crime bill, serious immigration crackdowns. I mean, Trump did partial criminal justice reform in his first term. That's the complete opposite of the Clinton crime bill, which skyrocketed incarceration.
Clinton's IIRAIRA bill laid out the blueprint currently being utilized for rapid deportations. In fact, 'expedited removal' is a core feature of the bill. Also, he architected the concept of administrative warrants currently being used by ICE for deportations.
I don't believe I said otherwise. And yet, your response doesn't at all touch on my other point.
https://archive.ph/0NalV
By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground.
I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
> I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat.
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
It is still people, not money, who votes for them over and over again…
Well when the choice is between two corrupt and/or bribed politicians...
I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
What they always really mean is tax cuts for those who need it least
"Talk" and "Walk" aren't the same word although they rhyme. And they only refer to Democrats, who are the only ones with agency in government (Murc's Law).
When they engage in financial conservation it's cover for destroying programs they don't like. The fact that they are cheering on yet another incredibly stupid, expensive, and pointless war proves that they are not "fiscal conservatives."
New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral, the electorate will be angry they don't have cake (unless the taxes are applied disproportionally to the top income and wealth percentiles), and we'll be right back to irresponsible policy. I don't have much hope for the US, but at least the bond market are the adults in the room currently. Congrats to those who strip mined the country successfully.
> New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral
That debt is never getting paid, I'm afraid.
I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses.
I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?
Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....
The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. It can be paid back, you just have to go after it. It's a choice not to. Forward curves go up because we choose to not reduce the debt? All consumer borrowing costs go up accordingly (consumer debt and mortgages are priced off of US treasuries)? A crisis occurs and there isn't any borrowing capacity left to get to the other side? Sucks to suck, try to suck less in the future. Natural consequences are an important component of the learning process.
Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible.
The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
Why is it ironic that Clinton balanced the budget?
Second term Bush not so great? Can you think of anything in his first term that maybe impacted the deficit for, say, two decades?
I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports.
That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
The Democrats have, in the past forty years, been the only party to have consistently been able to reduce the deficit, even creating a surplus by the end of Clinton's presidency.
They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]
Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.
This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.
The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/ls1088
The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees."
When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.
That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
Correct. It's also often forgotten how much the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) had done to make government more streamlined and efficient between 1993 and 1998. That took care of pretty much all the low-hanging fruit that those behind DOGE falsely believed was still there.
>The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does.
This has to be bait
This isn't a refutation or even an argument. If something was obviously incorrect, you would think it would be trivial to prove wrong. But, evidently not.
The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally.
The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
The Department of Defense has never received a clean opinion on a full financial audit. Since starting comprehensive yearly reviews in 2018, the Pentagon has failed eight consecutive enterprise-wide audits due to scale, missing records, and untrackable assets.
Federal Government Made $236 billion “Improper Payments” Last Fiscal Year: https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-government-made-236-billion...
The only propaganda I see here is coming from those who are so out of touch of reality that they firmly believe there's a chunk of the uniparty that doesn't increase the deficit.
When things are monitored to such a degree that a startup I was at couldn't bring doughnuts to a meeting because NASA was gonna there and that could possibly be a bribe, I don't know about efficient, but there's a reason why DOGE couldn't really find any waste.
Democrats support the exact same pork barreling.
The challenge now is that we have to have a vision for what we want to build.
This debt problem was long before Trump and this is why the US dollar is being printed straight to $0, until it loses its reserve currency status.
It really already did lose its reserve status, in a manner of speaking. There isn't ever going to be a gold standard again (even if there is, would the actual gold have the sort of real life uses it had when the gold standard was around? Not like people fill teeth with it anymore unless you are some sort of thug).
Gold is a fantastically useful element. It's vastly more useful today as our knowledge and application of chemistry has improved.
It's probably more in demand as a commodity today than it ever has been.
I hear platinum is the way to go. Or iron.
The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.
> It's also majority private sector funded
See if you can spot the ethical problems and corruption in that. It's there, I promise you. Look hard.
Die on? It's absolutely a symbol of the incompetent, corrupt and destructive admin--it's not just the dollars.
We should be very suspicions of the potential corruption caused by companies and individuals giving money to Trump's pet project.
Finally, we can criticize multiple things at the same time.
> It's also majority private sector funded
This is mostly a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_State_Ballroom#Fun...
Vast majority is to be paid for by taxpayers.
How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?
The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans.
If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.
But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.
There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.
Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
Don't forget the part where you then direct the DOJ to arrest and prosecute citizens inspecting the botched repair to THEIR POOL(as in the people's pool) so everyone in the admin can CYA and save face.
Federal gov deficit = private sector savings.
Only in a closed economy.