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39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for... - spending cuts - stopping fraud - figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases fr

39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for... - spending cuts - stopping fraud - figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster. It's not going to be fun.

conductr 4mo ago
This ball is already in motion IMO. Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun.
- bhouston 4mo ago
  > Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun For inflation to have an impact on the US debt, it has to be approaching the level at which the US debt is increasing. In the last year, the US debt increased by 7.6%, much higher than inflation.
  - conductr 4mo ago
    > much higher than inflation Was it really though? My statement you quoted was about the trustworthiness of inflation numbers
bhouston 4mo ago
Also please add as an option: raise taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations back. https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corporations-inequality/ https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora... This is really ambiguous: "- stopping fraud" And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people. I find this to be mostly a distraction: "- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars" We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US. This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings: "- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs" I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.
- roughly 4mo ago
  “Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.
  - brightball 4mo ago
    We have nearly doubled the federal budget over 10 years. It is a spending problem and a spending problem alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650
    - roughly 4mo ago
      This presumes that federal spending is a bad thing.
      - brightball 4mo ago
        Spending more than you have is bad. Inflating the currency making everyone poorer to pay for it is worse. This is basic economics. Yes, excessive federal spending is bad.
        roughly 4mo ago
        “Spending more than you have” is an equation with two terms in it, and that is my entire point. You’re focusing on the one term, I’m focusing on the other. Do you have a reason for saying the current amount of spending is bad other than that it’s not adequately covered by tax revenue?
        doxeddaily 4mo ago
        I'm with you, these people you are arguing with just want to spend us into oblivion. If people think we've had high inflation up until now well... we are just getting started.
toomuchtodo 4mo ago
There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value. https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...
- bhouston 4mo ago
  > There is nothing left to cut Hmm.... I found this, I wonder if there is any way this line item in the budget could be reduced, it looks sort of big: https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2026 https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...
  - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
    Correction accepted. Eight failed audits. Would love to see the will to fix this specific item, but am not confident it exists. We spent hundreds of billions on war with Iran before we forgave student loan debt and instituted Medicare for All, for example. The evidence is clear these are active choices we can make. We actively choose the bad financial policy choices through governance outcomes. The only branch of government I have faith in at the moment is the bond market. Pentagon fails financial audit for 8th year in a row - https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12/19/pentagon-fails-financial-audit-for-8th-year-in-a-row/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12... - December 19th, 2025 Fact Check: Has the Pentagon failed its 7th audit in a row? - https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-7th-audit-in-a-row https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-... - December 20th, 2024 Thoughts From the Bond Vigilantes - https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-vigilantes https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-... - December 9th, 2024
    - jimbokun 4mo ago
enragedcacti 4mo ago
> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
- magicalist 4mo ago
  >> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs > Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths. Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days. Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time. Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    If you gave a snap quiz to all Trump voters asking whether the cost of the Iran War or the DOGE cuts were greater, I wonder how many would get the right answer.
- anthonypasq 4mo ago
  > despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government. Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.
  - enragedcacti 4mo ago
    Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.
rawgabbit 4mo ago
From what I observe from fraud and corruption witch-hunts, they are nothing more than that. The real fraud is that government that is supposed to serve the people who elected it serves everyone else first.
- doxeddaily 4mo ago
  The issue here is everyone expects the government to be their literal daddy. The government isn't there to take care of you.
brightball 4mo ago
EDIT: I see several comments suggesting that there is nothing left to cut. I'm not sure how anyone squares that perspective with this federal budget growth chart. The federal budget over time... 2026 - $7.5 trillion 2020 - $4.8 trillion 2015 - $3.9 trillion 2010 - $3.7 trillion https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal government shouldn't be able to operate on a budget equivalent of about $4 trillion which was just about the average from 2010-2020. There seems to be quite a lot available to cut.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  That’s different than saying there’s a lot of “waste” to cut as many argue. The benefits agencies that make up the bulk of the spending have very low overhead and are run very efficiently. The vast majority of funds go directly to beneficiaries. Balancing the budget will require massive cuts to very popular programs.
- jltsiren 4mo ago
  You should leave Social Security out of the calculations. It's supposed to be a self-funding program that has no impact on budget balance. That accounts for ~$0.5 trillion of the growth since 2020. Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments. A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020. Then there is healthcare spending, which can be expected to grow faster than inflation, as the population is growing older. The US is basically running into the same issues as European welfare states. While government spending remains qualitatively the same, demographic changes make it grow faster than tax revenue. Those who couldn't maintain a balanced budget in the past are finding the situation particularly difficult. In some sense, the situation is even worse in the US. Healthcare (old age spending) is particularly expensive, while individuals have greater responsibility for childhood expenses.
  - brightball 4mo ago
    > Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments. A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020. If we account for only these two things, it is catastrophic. 1. Interest on the debt when we don’t have a balanced budget to stop growing that debt will spiral out of control. 2. When any part of that spending which is creating inflation already must then increase to pay for the inflation that it is causing, we are circling the drain. That is a death spiral. We need extreme, Javier Milei level cuts to the federal government.

conductr 4mo ago

This ball is already in motion IMO. Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun.

bhouston 4mo ago
> Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun For inflation to have an impact on the US debt, it has to be approaching the level at which the US debt is increasing. In the last year, the US debt increased by 7.6%, much higher than inflation.
- conductr 4mo ago
  > much higher than inflation Was it really though? My statement you quoted was about the trustworthiness of inflation numbers

bhouston 4mo ago

Also please add as an option: raise taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations back. https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corporations-inequality/ https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora... This is really ambiguous: "- stopping fraud" And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people. I find this to be mostly a distraction: "- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars" We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US. This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings: "- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs" I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.

roughly 4mo ago
“Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.
- brightball 4mo ago
  We have nearly doubled the federal budget over 10 years. It is a spending problem and a spending problem alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650
  - roughly 4mo ago
    This presumes that federal spending is a bad thing.
    - brightball 4mo ago
      Spending more than you have is bad. Inflating the currency making everyone poorer to pay for it is worse. This is basic economics. Yes, excessive federal spending is bad.
      - roughly 4mo ago
        “Spending more than you have” is an equation with two terms in it, and that is my entire point. You’re focusing on the one term, I’m focusing on the other. Do you have a reason for saying the current amount of spending is bad other than that it’s not adequately covered by tax revenue?
      - doxeddaily 4mo ago
        I'm with you, these people you are arguing with just want to spend us into oblivion. If people think we've had high inflation up until now well... we are just getting started.

toomuchtodo 4mo ago

There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value. https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...

bhouston 4mo ago
> There is nothing left to cut Hmm.... I found this, I wonder if there is any way this line item in the budget could be reduced, it looks sort of big: https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2026 https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...
- toomuchtodo 4mo ago
  Correction accepted. Eight failed audits. Would love to see the will to fix this specific item, but am not confident it exists. We spent hundreds of billions on war with Iran before we forgave student loan debt and instituted Medicare for All, for example. The evidence is clear these are active choices we can make. We actively choose the bad financial policy choices through governance outcomes. The only branch of government I have faith in at the moment is the bond market. Pentagon fails financial audit for 8th year in a row - https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12/19/pentagon-fails-financial-audit-for-8th-year-in-a-row/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12... - December 19th, 2025 Fact Check: Has the Pentagon failed its 7th audit in a row? - https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-7th-audit-in-a-row https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-... - December 20th, 2024 Thoughts From the Bond Vigilantes - https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-vigilantes https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-... - December 9th, 2024
  - jimbokun 4mo ago

enragedcacti 4mo ago

> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.

magicalist 4mo ago
>> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs > Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths. Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days. Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time. Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  If you gave a snap quiz to all Trump voters asking whether the cost of the Iran War or the DOGE cuts were greater, I wonder how many would get the right answer.
anthonypasq 4mo ago
> despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government. Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.
- enragedcacti 4mo ago
  Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.

rawgabbit 4mo ago

From what I observe from fraud and corruption witch-hunts, they are nothing more than that. The real fraud is that government that is supposed to serve the people who elected it serves everyone else first.

doxeddaily 4mo ago
The issue here is everyone expects the government to be their literal daddy. The government isn't there to take care of you.

brightball 4mo ago

EDIT: I see several comments suggesting that there is nothing left to cut. I'm not sure how anyone squares that perspective with this federal budget growth chart. The federal budget over time... 2026 - $7.5 trillion 2020 - $4.8 trillion 2015 - $3.9 trillion 2010 - $3.7 trillion https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal government shouldn't be able to operate on a budget equivalent of about $4 trillion which was just about the average from 2010-2020. There seems to be quite a lot available to cut.

jimbokun 4mo ago
That’s different than saying there’s a lot of “waste” to cut as many argue. The benefits agencies that make up the bulk of the spending have very low overhead and are run very efficiently. The vast majority of funds go directly to beneficiaries. Balancing the budget will require massive cuts to very popular programs.
jltsiren 4mo ago
You should leave Social Security out of the calculations. It's supposed to be a self-funding program that has no impact on budget balance. That accounts for ~$0.5 trillion of the growth since 2020. Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments. A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020. Then there is healthcare spending, which can be expected to grow faster than inflation, as the population is growing older. The US is basically running into the same issues as European welfare states. While government spending remains qualitatively the same, demographic changes make it grow faster than tax revenue. Those who couldn't maintain a balanced budget in the past are finding the situation particularly difficult. In some sense, the situation is even worse in the US. Healthcare (old age spending) is particularly expensive, while individuals have greater responsibility for childhood expenses.
- brightball 4mo ago
  > Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments. A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020. If we account for only these two things, it is catastrophic. 1. Interest on the debt when we don’t have a balanced budget to stop growing that debt will spiral out of control. 2. When any part of that spending which is creating inflation already must then increase to pay for the inflation that it is causing, we are circling the drain. That is a death spiral. We need extreme, Javier Milei level cuts to the federal government.