The national debt is expected to hit a record high as soon as this week, crossing a major threshold of $40 trillion. Congressional correspondent Lisa Desjardins explains why that milestone is a warning sign for many economists.
MAGA is how we got here. The current MAGAs, and the past larval Republicans. They are almost entirely responsible for the National Debt. The only times it has ever shrunk, was under Democratic administrations.
Because repubs cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and then spend spend spend.
Contrary to popular belief, they’re fiscally irresponsible and bad for the economy (and everything else really)
We are so fucked
Fuck you, it was Republicans.
There’s a reason this entire admin and cabinet is packed with hedge fund shitbags
This article’s title is a lie. It did not address how we got here.
I can tell you how we got here, at least the largest portion: Our oligarchs got tax cuts passed for themselves and routed money to their pockets. That’ll be the single largest bit.
Beyond that? Dunno. Crises hurt, yes. Wars also hurt.
Corruption is a huge one.
But
NPRPBS wussed out on calling Republicans out. I was expecting them to be "both sides’, but beyond a little mention of Republicans in a very general small way, they didn’t do what the title said they would do.A rare, shitty NPR article.
Be better on this.
A rare, shitty NPR article.
NPR was nerfed decades ago by Republicans. Same problem in Canada, CBC is pure garbage now because they are more concerned about their budget than offending any political party, so we get gardening shows.
A rare, shitty NPR article.
I know what you meant, but to clarify for like 80% of the /c/news comments section’s audience who don’t read beyond the headline in favor of learning what they should think from the top comment, this is PBS News Hour, not NPR.
(Also not an article; it’s a transcript of a newscast.)
I think the US military cost about 700 billion /y? What’s the rest? Not infrastructure, from what i heard.
They’re asking for 1,5 trillion for next year. Pentagon is the biggest single mechanism in history for transferring money from the poor to the rich. That’s why all of silicon valley have gone into the weapons industry.
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Can you point me to a source for that figure? I’ve been trying to follow the news pretty closely, and all the reporting I’ve seen has stated that Japan spent around 85 billion dollars, with the US adding about a third or fourth of that sum. So if the trillion dollar figure you stated is correct, they absolutely have done an incredible job masking it in the media reporting.
Japan is supposed to be the largest holder of US Treasury bonds in the world, and the total amount of the holding is regularly reported to be just above 1 trillion. I don’t really see why the US would bail Japan out to the tune of 1 trillion in order to stop japan from dumping its US holdings valued at around the same amount. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m admittedly no expert in finance so maybe I’m missing something.
The US budget is:
22% social security.
15% Medicare.
15% interest on debt.
13% Medicaid/Obamacare.
13% military spending.
10% unemployment and food stamp benefits.
6% veteran benefits including healthcare.
6% everything else: education, infrastructure, law enforcement, national parks, NASA, etc.you’re not allowed to know the real military budget.
Wha?
The actual military budget is classified secret.
They flew a plane in it when somebody tried to check the Pentagon accounting
America can be bought
Has been bought
Nobody’s going to like this answer. But the simple reality is this. Basically everything has to be cut. Yes, the rich need to pay their fair share. But there’s no way we can tax our way out of that kind of debt. It is not realistic. It is pure fantasy to think a person a company an organization, a country or anything else can literally bring in that kind of money. It’s impossible. So yes, tax the wealthy. But we are gonna have to make some serious hard cuts.
And we cannot just do cuts in one area. It will have to be cuts across the board.
And now I’m going to show my hypocrisy. I just said everything, but I’m going to turn around and say the only thing that we really can’t cut is Social Security. The elderly, who live on Social Security realistically can’t get another job. So we’d have a choice a bunch of old people in the streets or keep Social Security. So Social Security would have to stay and everything across the board has to be cut. And if we literally can’t make enough cuts without cutting into Social Security then yeah we’d have to cut Social Security too.
That means everybody’s pet project. Everybody’s favorite thing that the government spends money on is going to get cut. And yes, as I said if we can’t cut enough out of everything and we have to cut Social Security then Social Security would have to be cut back.
The other alternative is the entire country goes bankrupt. And I know there are people in lemmy that think that’s a good thing. You pay attention anything in economy or economics I should say. The US economy is too intertwined with other countries. If we go bankrupt, it will take a lot of economies around the world right with it. So that’s just not an option. So the US is going to have to cut their spending on pretty much everything. The alternative is bankruptcy
lol get fucked
You first
Wtf is this WE shit?? How did WE get us here???
For real. Should be the billionaire / zionist debt. Americans have been war weary for decades now. But Israel still needs money so here we all are.
Gtfoh if they can actually tax the billionaires the debt would go down by at least 2 trillion
Y’know, you’re right!
I didn’t like that answer, you oligargling shit gibbon.
I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. Actually I’m not. 50+ years of watching us over spend because of our addiction to spending. It’s like watching a crack addict beg for another hit.
Nobody’s going to like this answer. But the simple reality is this. Basically everything has to be cut.
Actually, exactly the opposite, corruption needs to be cut,
Cutting anything else just makes the problem worse.
Yes, the rich need to pay their fair share. But there’s no way we can tax our way out of that kind of debt. It is not realistic. It is pure fantasy to think a person a company an organization, a country or anything else can literally bring in that kind of money. It’s impossible.
You dont get out of this by cutting, that just leads to a depression.
You get out of this by aggressively going after corruption and corrupt loans, declaring those loans to be void, and enforcing that.
The other alternative is the entire country goes bankrupt.
Cutting everything is how the country goes bankrupt, thats literally the whole goal.
The very wealthy get in positions of power, and make the goverment go into massive debt giving them huge paydays. Then you cut all the things the government is supposed to do to service that “debt.” The economy takes a nosedive, but thats ok, you can just borrow more money to pay the very wealthy. Then make the government decalare bankruptcy, and “sell” the government off to private holdings (who own all that debt) for pennies on the dollar.
I’d be fine with this, as long as the rich were properly dealt with, first and foremost.
And I mean all of them. The Waltons? Nearly all the money they’ve made should go toward the national debt.
The Sacklers? All of their money to the debt, all of them imprisoned for what they’ve done.
And so on down the list, it would leave many of those families completely destitute and nearly destroyed, and then we can start cutting from the actual innocent people in the country who haven’t, y’know, tried to destroy it for their own personal gain.
Yes
Cutting just the military budget would get this paid off the fastest. The US spends almost a trillion per year on defense. Cut that in half and dedicate the other half to paying off the debt.
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-defense/country/united-states/
I’d be interested to know if the US debt is like a mortgage — where if you pay off the principal, that 40 trillion number goes down a lot faster.
I also wonder how much debt the US is owed by other countries. Could we do some debt swaps to pay it down even faster?
Personally I’m convinced you could cut the military budget by about 75 percent over a ten year period if you got rid of use it or lose it budgets and built government owned manufacturing for certain military stuffs. There’s no reason ammo, uniforms, MREs, and maybe even light vehicles can’t be produced in house. Also in addition military needs right to repair and the ability to pay bulk market rates for things like toilet paper.
The national debt is meaningless when it’s invested at home. Often generating many dollars per dollar spent. Everything doesn’t need to be cut. A lot of things need to be expanded. But what absolutely needs to be cut is the income streams of the wealthy including all the loopholes they use. And our spending on Military and wars.
No, don’t you realize that cutting childhood vaccine programs is NEEDED. If we don’t let these children get sick and develop lifelong illness that prevent them and their parents from working and bringing in tax revenue then… wait a second, that doesn’t sound right…
Well, what we really need to do is cut down the IRS. All those agents are just budget bloat. We can go without them investing tax evasion and bringing in revenue… wait a second…
We’ve had empirical evidence as early as the 70s that investment in ourselves is a huge boon to the economy but people still don’t want to see that. If I remember correctly, every 1 dollar invested in early childhood education programs returns 7. Cutting isn’t just bad in the short term, it’s a compounding issue that makes future revenue lower. The military really is one of the few things it makes sense to say we should cut as a blanket statement.
