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US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic
- toomuchtodo 1y agoIt is important to keep in mind that the treasury rate drives the rate of most consumer credit. If it gets more expensive for the US to borrow due to debt load, consumer credit will stay or get more expensive. This will, very likely, slow the economy due to increased cost of mortgages, auto loans, and unsecured credit.
- rhetocj23 1y agoYes the treasury rate is the base of all interest rates.
- supportengineer 1y agoIt could be said that all your base belong to US
- 2Gkashmiri 1y agoHa ha ha. Saw what you did there. Good
- rtaylorgarlock 1y agonailed it lol
- louthy 1y ago> all your base belong to US All your base are belong to US But still, bravo
- ta9000 1y agoDefinitely, if we could refinance at a 1-2% lower rate it would save us up to $1k/mo which we could spend or save (likely we’d just take that money and pay down the loan faster or invest it though, but most people would probably spend it on making their lives better).
- all2 1y agoI'm in exactly this position. I keep getting offers that would increase my monthly bill.
- jrs235 1y agoWhich will increase velocity and quantity of available dollars and lead to more inflation.
- jrs235 1y agoBut I'd prefer some inflation over a depression. We need lower rates AND lower max credit lines.
- danans 1y ago> If it gets more expensive for the US to borrow due to debt load, consumer credit will stay or get more expensive. This will, very likely, slow the economy due to increased cost of mortgages, auto loans, and unsecured credit. Probably, but for sobering reasons, maybe less so than in the past, because because 50% of US consumer spending is by the top 10%, and the top 10% is far less dependent on credit for their spending. A society where there is a more balanced distribution of spending power would be more affected by a consumer credit collapse, but the treasuries of such a society might be more desirable anyways.
- BoredPositron 1y agoThe top 10% don't hold their money in liquid assets. Most of the time they get loans and use their non-liquid assets as collateral. They just don't have money laying around.
- danans 1y agoSource? The top decile of the US income distribution starts at $170000/yr. The top decile of the wealth distribution is around $1M net worth. The people doing the borrow-for-spending-against-non-housing-assets-as-collateral are beyond the top .01%. While they are also spending whales, they are able to negotiate far more favorable rates than the rest of the top 10%, whose spending is mostly income-driven.
- pjc50 1y agoAmericans can get a preview of what happens when fiscal irresponsibility spooks markets and forces a rate rise by looking at the short-lived Liz Truss administration.
- snowwrestler 1y agoThe rate that most directly affects consumer-facing debt rates is the Fed’s target rate, which is manually set. To some extent it even influences short-term Treasury rates. This rate is managed to deliver the Fed’s dual mandate of full employment and low inflation.
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-drives-consumer-interest-rates https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-drives-cons... Day gig is at a firm that extends consumer credit, so I keep an eye on cost of capital tracking, monitoring the spread, etc. Any debt packaged and sold into debt markets (asset backed securities) competes against treasuries from a yield (and risk premium pricing) spread perspective. Mortgages, auto loans, some credit card books, etc. When the Fed cuts rates, your deposit account provider is going to start cutting your interest rate paid right away, but they’re going to maintain their credit rate pricing as long as possible (considering competition from other lenders) to maintain their spread and profit as long as possible. You see this with credit card interest rates, for example. TLDR 10Y treasury sets the rate floor, broadly speaking.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoAdditional citation: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/10/23/why-you-should-care-about-the-national-debt-hitting-38-trillion https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/10/23/why-you-should-...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drcongo 1y agoI'm painfully aware that this is a stupid question, but who do they owe that to?
- supportengineer 1y agoraises hand I buy Treasury products for my investment portfolio sometimes.
- typeofhuman 1y agoI-bonds had a great buying opportunity a couple years ago.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ptak 1y agoAnyone who has bought US treasuries/bonds, which includes regular people, but also most nation states.
- proaralyst 1y agoUS treasuries (bonds, notes and bills) are mostly considered as good as cash. They're used heavily in the international banking system (for payments, and as loan collateral themselves). They're also held to maturity by large institutional investors with predictable liabilities (ie payments) like pension and insurance funds. Banks will hold some of their assets (eg deposits) in treasuries too. Also foreign governments and central banks will have holdings. Tether (the cryptocoin) is largely backed by US treasuries.
- noarchy 1y agoAnyone who owns US treasuries. That may be you. But I am sure many here own US debt. Institutions and sovereign entities own quite a bit. The US Social Security Trust Fund is a major holder as well.
- gandalfian 1y agoWeirdly themselves. Makes my head hurt but the central bank, the social security fund and some other bits of US government basically own most of the national debt. Then it's the Japanese, British, Chinese and Warren Buffet. But less than you would guess.
- gandalfian 1y agoOf course that was back when a trillion dollars was worth something.
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoI’m not able to read the article right this moment, but I immediately wonder if it’s the fastest accumulation after adjusting for inflation? I’m guessing yes.
- hirako2000 1y agoIs economic growth typically adjusted for inflation?
- snowwrestler 1y agoYes, it is called “real GDP growth.”
- hirako2000 1y agoThat's right. If the IMF says so, we are good.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- downrightmike 1y agoOddly enough inflation makes money worth less, and that makes the debt easier to manage because inflation doesn't increase the dollar amount owned.
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoit makes servicing a debt easier because the amount owed doesn't inflate but that doesn't actually make it irrelevant to this metric because what we're looking at is new borrowing, not accumulated debt. if an apple cost a penny a hundred years ago and a dollar today, and the government borrowed to buy an apple a hundred years ago and then again to buy another apple today, it makes sense to compare apples to apples and the only way to do that is to adjust that penny to what it would be worth today, one dollar
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- thhoooowww0101 1y ago[dead]
- knickerbockeroo 1y agoReminder: as long as we have the printers running[1] and the dollar being the fiat currency of the world, this doesn't mean anything. [1] https://brrr.money/ https://brrr.money/
- the_real_cher 1y agoIs the site down? I wanted to visit based on the name alone.
- philk10 1y agoTry this - https://www.moneyprintergobrrr.com https://www.moneyprintergobrrr.com
- 1121redblackgo 1y agoit does matter when printers go brr, a lot. Printing/QE is the most likely way out and its really going to hurt main street
- notmyjob 1y agoThe past two administrations, arguably the past three if you think the pandemic was overblown (I don’t), have been totally reckless with spending and their ostrich-like refusal to reform entitlements. Maybe the suspension of SNAP will “break the seal” on further entitlement cuts?
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoOr it'll be a real-world test of the whole "three missed meals away from violent revolution" quote of Lenin's.
- notmyjob 1y agoWhere I live, private sector food programs are very healthy, and so it seems unlikely this will be much of any local impact beyond retailers’ bottom lines. For example, the Taco Bell drive thru down the street from me has a huge sign “WE TAKE EBT!!!” which I assume corresponds to the local consumers being largely subsidized chalupa eaters. I wonder if chalupas will decline in value from $7 dollars or whatever artificially inflated price they’ve reached, back down to their old timey price of $3? (I’m not sure I have those prices exactly right as I’ve only purchased Taco Bell once or twice since in the past few decades. I confess I don’t get EBT yet, so my perspective is a naive one. It may be the case that chalupas are a better value proposition than Safeway prices in the suburban food desert where I live. There’s certainly a dearth of drive thrus.)
- SoftTalker 1y agoWhen did EBT start being legal at restaurants? I thought it was only for unprepared food (e.g. grocery store items).
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoWhen someone realized that people exist who don't have ready access to kitchens?
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- the_real_cher 1y agoIf they just fire the person reporting these deficit numbers, we won't have a deficit. It's very simple.
- testing22321 1y agoWhat happens if Trump decides to default on the debt? Could this be how he stops the election, or stops the vote count?
- typeofhuman 1y agoI will bite... What are you talking about?
- testing22321 1y agoIt seems likely he’s going to try to hold onto power indefinitely. His options are start a major war, default on the debt, ? Hold onto your hats
- prewett 1y agoNeither defaulting on the debt or starting a major war are effective ways to hold on to power, sheesh. He already tried to hold on to power, so you could just look at how he tried last time, that's one of the typical strategies. The other main one is a military coup.
- testing22321 1y agoCreating a global crisis is an excellent way to hold onto power. Not that they started it or want it to continue, and not that I think Zelenski is anything other than a hero, but the case in point is Ukraine not holding elections since the war started. When Zelenski told trump there have been no elections during the war trump, on camera, was delighted and said “very good”.
- piva00 1y agoAnother option is the modern authoritarian model, Competitive Authoritarianism [0] as deployed by Órban, Putin, etc. You castrate the media, and take control of major vehicles to tilt the balance in your favour in quasi-sham elections; accumulate power in the executive while keeping the remaining seats of power under the thumb of the branch: legislative gets installed with sycophants/acolytes, judiciary power is tamed/dimished and regime-adjacent judges installed. If you play this well you keep getting elected when elections happen and slowly twists more the sword into all democratic institutions. [0] https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-new-competitive-authoritarianism/ https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-new-competit...
- InTheArena 1y agoat some point - spending stops becoming a political game, and we start to take debt seriously. But no one in politics won't do that.
- georgemcbay 1y agoCutting out many of the already shaky social safety nets, still accumulating massive debt. This should end well. I understand the self-interested desire for the ultra wealthy to have lower taxes on an individual level, but yet I still don't understand how they are perpetually blind to the fact that whatever the release valve for the historic and still growing massive wealth inequality we have takes, it won't be great for them either in the long term. Sure its nice for them to make asset grabs during economic downturns, but eventually there's always a tipping point where things go upside down chaotic and I don't feel like we are that far away from it now.
- randlet 1y ago> I understand the self-interested desire for the ultra wealthy to have lower taxes on an individual level, I don't. It seems like mental illness to me
- georgemcbay 1y agoTo clarify a bit... I meant I understand it in the sense that to get that wealthy in the first place you have to have a special kind of self-interested sociopathy, so in that regard I understand their desire. Not that I agree with it.
- randlet 1y agoGotcha. I should have realized you meant that from the rest of your post.
- freedomben 1y agoEvery human is self-interested. Fortunately there are a lot of good people out there who try to temper that instinct, but remembering that everybody by default has a "what's in it for me" line of thinking (even if consciously attempting to subjugate it) is important for understanding as much as we can about how the world works. I don't think a sleasy real estate agent is behaving any differently (by jacking up fees, putting people in properties that may not be in their best interest, strong-arming FSBOs into listing with them) than the billionaire is, it's just the scale of their blast radius that is different. That's not to equate the two, because obviously scale matters, but the underlying motiviation is largely the same.
- kurtis_reed 1y agoThe debt isn't the issue, spending is, and it has bipartisan support.
- softwaredoug 1y agoWell taxation also. As the debt has exploded over the decades we've dramatically cut top tax brackets.
- hackeraccount 1y agoI'd suggest looking at two things. What percentage of the economy tax receipts represent and the breakdown of how much revenue comes from the top tax brackets. You could also look at spending a percentage of GDP over time. My view with all that in mind is that spending has gone up quite a bit. Overall tax revenue has stayed remarkably consistent and the tax system is progressive (i.e. if you make more you pay more). Is it progressive enough? I don't know. What percent of the budget should that top 10% (or top 1%) be paying? 20%? 30%? At the end of the day though getting 20% of GDP in to the Federal government as tax has historically been a heavy lift. If you get a government that's willing to vote to do that then I would be that that you will soon find new one that's willing to vote not to do that. That said getting spending in the range has the same problem. At some point though it seems inevitable that one (or both?) of those statements will prove to be untrue.
- UltraSane 1y agoNo, the issue is we stopped taxing the rich to pay for spending without stopping the spending.
- cheschire 1y agoI thought the U.S. government was shutdown specifically because spending didn't have bipartisan support?
- rayiner 1y agoGiven that U.S. federal spending always goes up, and inflation always goes up, wouldn't it be the case that every $1T in debt would be accumulated faster than the previous $1T? That's generally how exponential growth works: https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/12202021_fig1.png https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12...
- Starman_Jones 1y ago[dead]
- dehrmann 1y agoNot to mention population growth. The debt per capita or debt to GDP could be improving (it's not) and we still see headlines like this. It's a fun milestone, but context matters.
- missedthecue 1y agoNo, not if tax receipts grew faster than spending was growing. In that case, deficit spending would shrink and the debt would accumulate slower.
- josefritzishere 1y agoApparently shell companies in the Cayman islands own a lot of this debt? Can anyone validate? https://www.threads.com/@shresht/post/DINKpmAzqm0/can-someone-please-explain-why-cayman-islands-owns-us-debt https://www.threads.com/@shresht/post/DINKpmAzqm0/can-someon...
- s1artibartfast 1y agoAbout 450 billion of the national debt is held in the Cayman Islands, or a little more than 1% of the 38 trillion total. About the same as Belgium and Luxenberg, but significantly less than Japan, UK, and China. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/slt_table5.html https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
- softwaredoug 1y agoSomehow during Dem administrations, we have an improving budget deficit (even sometimes a surplus) while maintaining more of a social safety net. That should pretty much tell you everything.
- isoprophlex 1y agobut were they winning as hard as the current administration?
- cakeday 1y ago[flagged]
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoIt is a difficult balance to strike. Unless you outlaw _all_ jokes, there will be some jokes that are just on the line of “funny enough”/“not too trollish”. Personally i find this kind of joke hilarious, but people will all have different tastes
- kelnos 1y agoI don't come here for jokes, so I downvote pretty much any joke I see, regardless of whether or not I think it's funny or clever.
- davidguetta 1y agolook at me: i'm the downvoter now
- bigyabai 1y agoWhat is trollish? The "winning" is copied verbatim from White House communique.
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- nekusar 1y agoSo... can someone explain who do we owe this 38T$ *TO*? Or is this more similar medical debt funny money where they just use a RNG to make up a number.
- jeffbee 1y agoMostly to ourselves.
- nekusar 1y agoIf that's the case, why not write it off then? Or is this some 38T$ leveraged against our future? Like how this debacle in Chicago screwed over 75 years of residents. https://www.courthousenews.com/seventh-circuit-upholds-chicagos-75-year-parking-privatization-deal/ https://www.courthousenews.com/seventh-circuit-upholds-chica...
- pjc50 1y agoThat's people's pensions and bank operating capital and so on. People tend to get upset if you zero out their 401k. "We", meaning the people and organizations, is not the same entity as "we" meaning the government.
- amluto 1y agoForget everyone’s 401(k). Canceling the US debt would wipe out very large fractions of most businesses’ and individuals’ operating capital.
- szundi 1y agoHe or she meant 75% US people. But not everyone. Just the upper ones, who don’t have mortgages but lending the money to people - now on higher rates haha
- chowells 1y ago"Ourselves" meaning people who have invested in Treasury Bills and other US bonds. Writing it off would mean eliminating massive amounts of wealth. That isn't really politically tenable for anyone.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoIn general I am a deficit owl, not hawk...but I don't believe the recent tax law, which barely does anything for middle class downwards, is a productive use of debt. Debt accumulated for productive means is usually okay, but not this upwards accumulation of wealth.
- nerdsniper 1y agoI believe there's a slight typo in your statement, where you use a double-negative where perhaps you meant only one 'NOT'. > I don't believe the .. is not a ... Instead, just tell us what you do believe. It's generally clearer to use "positive" language rather than stacking negations.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoI edited the typo. Thanks for your other opinion, nerdsniper
- wppick 1y agoAlso upwards accumulation of wealth can sometimes mean less tax revenue. Middle class salary workers pay a lot of tax, so with more upwards accumulation of wealth (maybe accelerating due to AI) then what will happen to tax revenue? People getting laid off don't pay tax, and shifting that money to corporate, tax havens, and cap gains types of taxes will probably end up lower overall
- SoftTalker 1y ago> Middle class salary workers pay a lot of tax No they don't. If we're talking about federal income tax, the vast majority of is paid by the wealthy.
- wppick 1y agoAll tax. Income tax, payroll tax, consumption tax
- wagwang 1y agoHere is proposal to the boomers from a zoomer. I've paid over 100k in social security in my lifetime. Apparently social security is "not an entitlement(lol)" but you can have it all. Take every cent, but starting tomorrow there are no more checks.
- fluidcruft 1y agoYou do realize that boomers have already paid way more into the system? The people who didn't pay in (old poors 100 years ago) are dead and gone.
- wagwang 1y agoOh but I thought it was a saving program?
- fluidcruft 1y agoNo, the government pays for current services and then spends the rest as a loan to itself (see $38T debt above). The boomers were so big that there was massively more collected then spent. The idea was to loan that extra to the government and the government could structure the debt to smooth things out because eventually the boomers are so big that there will be more spent than immediately collected.
- wagwang 1y agoThat fine and all but current trends point to the ss drying up because of demographic decline so it seems like it was just a big ponzi at the end of the day with millennials and younger holding the bag. Also, if its true that the boomers have paid surplus into the fund that is meant to smooth out the payment curve, then why do they need my money.
- cakeday 1y agoWe all grow old. Your situation today may not be the same as tomorrow and you may find your smug self needing social security.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoThis is what a "fiscally conservative" party in charge of government looks like
- bradfa 1y agoIn fiscal 2024 the US federal government brought in revenues of $4.9T and spent $6.8T (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185). Of that $6.8T, mandatory spending accounted for $4.1T (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61182 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61182). Mandatory spending is automatic, the laws are already in place and the money is spent based on the situation and natural demand. Of the $2.7T of not-mandatory spending, $0.9T was servicing existing debt. Of the remaining $1.8T of actual spending, defense accounted for $0.85T. The final remaining $0.96T is what's actually voted on in any budget, which is about 15% of all government spending (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61184 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61184).
- thethimble 1y agoIs "mandatory" spending actually fundamentally mandatory? Characterizing it as such feels like a sleight of hand that prevents us from discussing whether that spend is truly necessary. In an overspending crisis of such magnitude I wish there was more urgency in the culture to cut spending across every budget segment regardless of whether it's "mandatory" or not.
- ethbr1 1y ago"Mandatory" in the sense that there are laws on the books that say it must be spent. Sure, Medicare or Social Security can be cut, but see how that flies in the polls.
- bdangubic 1y agoif they refunded every penny we put into (with interest) it’d go well. these should be called entitlements as much you going to grocery story to buy food for your family is an entitlement
- toomuchtodo 1y agoYou can’t refund it because it isn’t a bank account, it is pay as you go. It’s insurance, both cash benefit and medical. Certainly, it might fly with the uneducated and unsophisticated, but not someone who knows better.
- bertili 1y agoHere is a puzzle: Investors in bonds look for a percentage growth, year over year. That's an exponential. A linear growth would be non-investable in the longer run. From the other side, the US debt is quite linear on a log scale, so also exponential. That suddenly looks scary. But that is really to be expected? Exponential is the natural curve. If it wasn't exponential it would disappear, year over year.
- franktankbank 1y agoWhy the assumption that things are all exponential?
- bertili 1y agoI don’t have the answers but we have a system where, if you loan out money we expect a return that is a percentage of the amount of the loan, rather than say a flat loan fee.
- anon291 1y agoBecause population grows exponentially, either up or down, and money is a means of quantifying work and labor at the end of the day. Thus its value rises in the same way Put another way, there is no number of children per couple C such that a population initially composed of N individuals will always add X>1 number of children per year in perpetuity. If every person has one kid (or alternately, every couple two), then the growth rate is zero and the population constant. Constant population is exponential (exponent = 0). If the number per couple is below two, then population declines exponentially. Fewer and fewer people die each year but also fewer are added. Eventually the population hits zero If the number is more than two, then more and more are added each year
- EcommerceFlow 1y agoThe VAST majority of this growth will continue to be in healthcare and/or social security (mostly healthcare though). Until our healthcare markets become more free market, this growth in spending will accelerate as boomers age.
- jimmar 1y agoConservatives want to cut taxes to force liberals to cut spending. Liberals want to increase spending to force the conservatives to increase taxes. But voters don't like increased taxes (on themselves) or decreased spending. So we end up with the worst of both worlds--higher spending without the tax revenue to afford it. Then we get to watch each side win the war of opinion on cable news. They throw each other under the bus, eventually come to a deal, and both sides claim victory. Rinse. Repeat.
- ryan_lane 1y ago> Conservatives want to cut taxes to force liberals to cut spending. Liberals want to increase spending to force the conservatives to increase taxes. This is straight propaganda. Both parties increase spending. One party cuts taxes for the rich, the other increases taxes on the rich. Conservatives haven't been "small government" and haven't cut taxes for folks other than the rich in a long, long time. Even calling them "small government" is a misnomer, because that propaganda is about privatization, not reducing costs (private services are less efficient and more costly than the government service they replace!) Let's stop calling the problem "both-sides". One side is considerably worse for the economy, and you and I know it's the conservatives.
- anon291 1y agoA 'cost' paid for by a private service directly translates into prices and salaries. Whereas a government wealth transfer program appears as taxation and handouts. Everyone likes the former. No one likes the latter. Why this is still confusing in 2025 is beyond me
- ryan_lane 1y agoThis is why I say it's propaganda. The same underlying service is being done. It hasn't been cut. It's been shifted from a government service, to a private industry. The government pays roughly the same amount they were previously paying (or in a lot of cases slightly more, with the promise of paying less in the future), the private company provides the service as cheaply as they can, and takes a cut of the cost for profit, benefiting a small number of people, while providing a worse service level for tax payers. This isn't a capitalism vs socialism thing. My issue with it is that privatization is blatant corruption sold as "capitalism". There's no capitalism here, because there's no competition, outside of the bidding on the contract. Competing on who can provide the cheapest service doesn't improve the service; in fact, it reduces the service quality to maximize profit. Reducing service quality to maximize profit would be fine, from a capitalism point of view, if others were offering the same service to the customer.
- Havoc 1y agoAnd the eastern aligned nations are buying gold like there is no tomorrow Think the dollar may soon find itself as not only game in town for trade sooner than initially thought
- mainecoder 1y agoWell I agree than Gold will have the ultimate endurance but for now the Dollar is backed by US Military. As long as the Military is Strong the US economy is guaranteed to at least be better than the median of developed nations there has not been real economic reasons for war yet but as soon as there is the economic reasons become politicized and that will serve as a pretext for taking the resources.
- IT4MD 1y ago[dead]
- sershe 1y agoMost money being spent on Medicare and social security. Non means tested programs transferring the money from everyone else to the richest demographic in the US. Also the least productive use of it. Self-admittedly structured as a ponzi racket so it would be difficult to undo. Manifestly demographically unsustainable, as is readily admitted by Social security org itself (they have a projected date when full benefits will not be paid without additional money). Everything else, when talking about debt, is talking about rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
- Geee 1y agoThis problem should be fixed on a constitutional level. The Swiss Debt brake seems to be working, and is probably a good model to copy. https://www.efd.admin.ch/en/the-debt-brake https://www.efd.admin.ch/en/the-debt-brake
- ponector 1y ago>> 85% of voters approved the constitutional provision on the debt brake in 2001 Impossible to imagine this in any other country. Compare to voting where 50% of Brits voted to destroy their economy.
- jemmyw 1y agoThat's nonsense. I think brexit was a terrible idea but people didn't vote to destroy the economy, and the British economy is still there. Losing 4% productivity relative to where it'd be otherwise is bad for sure, but not destroyed.
- shortrounddev2 1y agoThe sick man of Europe gets sicker
- ponector 1y agoIt takes decades to destroy economy. Even Brexit or Trump or putin cannot destroy it overnight.
- siliconc0w 1y agoWe essentially need to increase taxes to pre-trump levels (we've demonstrably seen that these cuts did not "pay for themselves", they're paid with debt), collect the taxes that are already owed (fund the IRS), and fix healthcare spending (which everyone knows is broken in at least half a dozen different ways). Fixing healthcare is essentially PBM reform, price transparency, drug negotiation, deregulation to increase supply, and subsidized GLP-1s since metabolic illness/chronic disease is like 90%+ of costs. If we increase revenue and decrease healthcare costs, we could get to within 3% of GDP.
- EasyMark 1y agoJust more data to show the Musk "doge" team was complete BS and their sole purpose was to disrupt regulatory departments to his and the broligarch advantage. All the drama was just a smokescreen while they gutted bodies that regulated their business interests.
- casey2 1y agoWhere is this money actually going? Does anybody see it in their day to day? It all feels like it's spent maintain a fragile status quo, fragile peace, fragile health, (not so) fragile roads but still. Something doesn't sit right, if Clinton got the deficit under control while maintaining a strong economy it should be easier with modern technology. Lots of fraud going on I guess. health&pharma, oil&gas, defense have seen major year on year profit increases since then when at best improvements should be very marginal due to the nature of the businesses. They are also large portions of the budget. In general any industry that has exploded in profits that can't be explained by increased market share should be looked into very closely.
- casey2 1y agoFTC didn't go through with their plan on abolishing noncompetes... for doctors... facepalm WHY DO DOCTORS NEED NONCOMPETES!? To keep prices artificially high is the answer
- shortrounddev2 1y agoIf you ever go outside of the US it is shocking how much other countries do with so little. Countires with a tenth of our population and an even smaller fraction of our GDP have cheap, efficient, high quality health care systems and clean, convenient public transportation. They have well equipped classrooms with teachers who don't have to work two jobs to get by. They have highly skilled police forces whose training is measured in years, not weeks. These countries are not perfect, but they seem to govern far nore effectively than the richest country on that planet. I'm not even talking about an idealized Europe; some southeast asian countries are like this too. So yeah, where is the money going? When you combine state, local, and federal, the US spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on education (more than our military!) but where does it go? We regularly churn out illiterate graduates and teachers have to commute from another state away in order to find somewhere affordable to live. We spend more money per capita on healthcare than anyone else in the world for worse coverage and worse outcomes. I hypothesize that the dollar's status as the world reserve currency is actually a bad thing. It makes it cheap for us to borrow money and as a result encourages all kinds of social pathologies associated with ZIRP
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- pfannkuchen 1y agoI’m surprised I haven’t seen anybody on the libertarian end advocating for a default. It would harm the government’s ability to take debt in the future, but presumably they would consider that a good thing. There would be some pain in the middle as assumed future cash flows would evaporate, but I’m not sure how valuable those even are long term in the face of significant monetary debasement.
- metalman 1y agowhats the big fuss,it's only .38 quadrillion bucks
- sbennettmcleish 1y ago(not an American) .. but only if there was a group of people with lots of extra money just sitting around invested in things growing in value ;-)