U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe I said otherwise. And yet, your response doesn't at all touch on my other point.

Well when the choice is between two corrupt and/or bribed politicians...

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.

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.

Democrats support the exact same pork barreling.

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?

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.