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US National Debt Adds $1 Trillion Every 100 Days.
by jimmydddd 2y ago
US National Debt Adds $1 Trillion Every 100 Days.
- skywhopper 2y agoWhat is your point?
- snapcaster 2y agoTheir point (i assume because had same convo with my dad) is that the debt is such an emergency we should toss the rule of law
- intalentive 2y agoSometimes following rules leads to an unrecoverable state, and then you have no choice but to reboot. Compound interest leads to either stagnation and decline, or else to jubilee. It's an inherently unstable system that has felled many civilizations before ours. Debt grows exponentially while real economies saturate in an S-curve. Eventually something has to give.
- tsunamifury 2y agoThis is not that situation, you're been told so so you can give up what little power you have left out of stupidity.
- intalentive 2y agoInterest payments are the largest item of the federal budget. Give it time and they will consume the whole thing.
- mc32 2y agoStop unaudited government spending? Ukraine says it’s received only about half of what the Biden admin said it gave it. It's looking like this was at least larping as a 40+ billion dollar slush fund. There may have been some legitimate (useful) spending, and they will find out after auditing the system, but it also looks like there was lots of waste and once-removed (one degree of separation) self-dealing.
- selimthegrim 2y agoThis doesn’t mean what you think.
- skywhopper 2y agoHow exactly is this approach an improvement over the status quo? Elon is not auditing spending. He’s pursuing political grudges and generating chaos for its own sake. The outcome will not be less government waste and fraud.
- empyrrhicist 2y agoRead the rest of their replies in the thread - they're fully living in a full on fantasy land concerning what's actually happening.
- tyre 2y agoYes and it is fine. That’s a scary number with zero context, but given the borrowing rate and the investments we’re making in future GDP, this is good borrowing! it isn’t good when a group of people tries to destroy the entity that’s making those investments. These shitheads are basically corporate raiders coming in to tear things apart for personal gain. Ironically, it is the “fiscally responsible”, “WhY nOt RuN gOvErNmEnT lIkE a BuSiNeSs” gang who want to destroy any fiscally responsible investment. If they want to reduce spending meaningfully, they need to cut defense, social security, and Medicare. They won’t, because it’s political suicide.
- schnable 2y agoWhich investments in future GDP do you mean?
- gotoeleven 2y agoThe billions of dollars for 8 EV charging stations. That kind of investment.
- Bhilai 2y agoProvably false, if you bother to get out of your echo chamber https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/pete-buttigieg-did-not-spend-75-billion-build-8-ev-charging-stations-2024-12-13/ https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/pete-buttigieg-did-not-sp...
- FergusArgyll 2y agoI'm curious if you read the fact check? The most charitable interpretation is 243 Chargers. According to the AP[0] it's 214 [0] https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-electric-vehicle-charging-stations-75-billion-buttigieg-1ddcd6ee193fc1847e5401c95c016ec3 https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-electric-vehicle-charg...
- magicalist 2y ago
- jacobjjacob 2y agoIf a balanced budget led to a flat or negative GDP, reduced the USA’s power and influence globally, and/or lowered standards of living, then would it still be desirable? What exactly is the argument against a deficit besides that it might be giving some groups leverage over the USA, which is dubious?
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoThe argument is that it inevitably gets you to a state like Argentina was in, where the government repeatedly defaults until eventually you're forced to crash the economy for years to escape the loop. I'd rather have a flat GDP than 95% annual inflation.
- jacobjjacob 2y agoI’m not advocating for war but one thing this deficit pays for is being a military superpower, which is the main way our debt is “guaranteed”. As in, call in the debt at your own peril.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoUS government debt doesn't exist as a line-of-credit agreement that someone could choose whether or not to "call in". It's primarily represented by Treasury bonds, securities which represent a promise by the US government to pay a specific amount of money at a specific point in time. It's true that the US can decide one day to default on these promises, but this doesn't have anything to do with military strength, nor can military strength mitigate the negative consequences for the (mostly domestic) investors.
- LastTrain 2y agoYou are advocating killing our own citizens for trying to cash in their t-bills?
- forgotoldacc 2y ago
- caspper69 2y agoWho holds the vast majority of the debt of the government of the United States? Hint: it's not China, the UK or any other foreign government. It's us silly. We owe ourselves. :)
- atq2119 2y agoPrecisely. The only potential problem here is that "we owe ourselves" simplifies things given that some individuals are owed much more than others, i.e. there's inequality. Other than that? The whole debt charade is just political groups weaponizing (and perpetuating) the lack of fairly basic macro-economic understanding in the population.
- carlosjobim 2y ago[flagged]
- Nasrudith 2y agoThere is a reason why third world countries choose IMF funding even with the strings attached even though default is always an option. It turns out having credit is very valuable to stability and progress and therefore defaulting is a very bad thing.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThe reason being that the ruling class benefits from selling out their subjects to financial vultures? Being rich in a first world countries is very neat, even great. Being rich in a third world country is like thirteen levels above that. For you and for your family.
- caspper69 2y agoTruth be told, it's institutional money. Turns out that having a 100% guaranteed return is attractive to a lot of large-scale investors, even if the yields don't make the money machine go brrr. This is one thing that worries me about the current administration. A lot of trust is built on the fact that the US gov't has never defaulted on a debt in its history. I feel like some people don't place enough weight into what that really means for both ourselves and the world.
- mindcandy 2y ago76 of those days are social security, medicare/medicaid, vet benefits, income security for the poorest citizens and interest payments. 15 of those days are national defense. 9 of those days are what Elon hopes to cut in half. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... The deficit is a huge problem. I don't know how to fix it. But, what DOGE has done so far is exactly the opposite of what makes sense.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoI agree with your numbers. If we're seeing this much resistance to cutting down mostly foreign-focused programs, would you really be making this comment if Elon/Trump were trying to cut social security, medicare/aid, etc?
- jensensbutton 2y agoI think it's primarily the "how" that people are resisting. I'm not sure why that's being dismissed.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoMaybe elsewhere, but this specific thread (i.e. the parents I responded to) appears to focus on the actions, not the "how".
- mindcandy 2y agoI would be 10X as concerned and so would everyone else because mishandling those programs could absolutely wreck the lives of tens of millions of people. My point is that a lot of people seem to be in an "ends justify the means" mindset here where it's OK to rubber-stamp over laws, security, any sort of requirements for competence, or even basic understanding of what's being destroyed because in the end, this is chaos is going to have such a tremendous impact. But, it's not. It mathematically can't. Even if it all turns out amazing it will be a small dent in the problem it's claiming to solve. So, in the end, all of this is actually just chaos for sake of chaos. In the process, a whole lot of real people will be hurt in real ways. It's not bad at the same scale that "Turn off Medicare until we understand how it works" would be. But, it's nonsensically destructive in exactly the same way.
- mempko 2y agoTo put it another way, the private sector gets an income of $1 trillion every 100 days. Now suppose you stop that income. What happens to the private sector?
- timeon 2y agoSo US is trying Germany's austerity?