When it comes to the federal debt and deficit, the American voting public are children who want: candy, sugar soda, to stay up all night, and to skip school, and their politicians tell them: Yes. The politicians who have said they would prioritize debt and deficit who then got into office, didn’t fulfill those promises. And when we do reduce parts of spending, we do it on those who most need the government spending.
15 to 30 percent of grocery costs are diesel fuel. Groceries are moved with vehicles using diesel fuel.
By the end of the Biden administration, the US was approaching a full soft landing, but Trump ruined it with government spending, tariffs, war, and strict immigration policies.
An Iphone isn’t a tech product, it’s a luxury product. Owning an Apple means you should reproduce, owning an Android means your DNA should not move on.
CNN brings fake experts who are more dishonest propagandists than serious intellectuals just so they can have a conservative side in their 5-minute debates.
The Census Bureau is a respected data institution, and the Trump administration has used think tank hacks to produce an obviously bad report under the Census Bureau’s name. This is a dangerous corruption of our data agencies that we depend on to understand our country.
Trump repeatedly said that he would lower or eliminate the debt. He did the opposite.
Japan has lots of assets like a massive sovereign wealth fund. When you subtract these assets from their debts, their debt to GDP ratio is 77%, which isn’t that high.
Japan takes money from its people in the form of taxes and then invests in assets like US treasury bonds. Because their currency depreciated over time, their debt has become worth less, while their foreign assets have become worth more.
This has benefited Japan a lot, but may backfire if the Yen goes up, foreign interest rates lower, or Japanese interest rates rise. If Japan has inflation, this could force them to raise interest rates or live with inflation.
For a long time, a lot of people who really just wanted a smaller government pretended to care about debt (or fooled themselves into thinking they cared about debt).
Three quarters of US government spending make the federal government an insurance company with an army. As a percentage of the total spending, waste fraud and abuse is very small. DOGE was a failure because it didn’t understand the US federal government. If you want to significantly reduce spending, you have to stop sending Americans checks (like Medicare and Social Security), or/and have to weaken the military, although the check cutting part is much bigger than the military spending part.
Republican politicians used to lie, or be misinformed, by saying that tax cuts pay for themselves; now they lie, or are misinformed, by saying Trump won the 2020 election (he did not). It’s hard to make a tough compromise under such politics.
“Mark Cuban is taking aim at the U.S. healthcare system, arguing that widespread billing abuse by insurers and providers could be a major source of federal revenue–if only they were held accountable.
“If we fined insurers and providers $100 every time they over-billed, incorrectly denied care or misrepresented any amount of patient out of pocket, we could pay off the national debt,” the billionaire entrepreneur posted on X last week.”
America’s rising debt, inequality, and inability to appropriately tax its wealthy, rhymes with what was happening leading up to the French revolution. The French put off their economic problems until the only solution was revolution.