Upsetting how we are reaching these lows while the administration is accusing everyone else of wasting taxpayer money except for themselves. At least under previous administrations you would get something for your money, like science funding and healthcare for the needy, not just bombing runs and posturing.
Both can be true. The previous administration bailed out the unfunded pension funds of cities and state employees when they did Covid-19 bailouts despite it having nothing to do with Covid-19 and without requiring these local governments to properly fund these pensions moving forward. They bailed these pension programs out many times more than their financial support for restaurants they forced closed. Basically, America has an economy that is buoyed by AI development and infrastructure spending right now but is poised to pop and the national debt has been ballooned by two to three generations of political leadership failing to properly address underlying issues and instead printing money.
It's a difficult tradeoff. By taxing more and more it's easy to send the economy into the death spiral so to grow the revenue without killing the economy you need economic growth. Cutting taxes will not give the growth aromatically but carefully designed tax system with low taxes where it helps should be a part of the strategy.
In practice though tax cuts usually make rich richer without helping the economy to grow (because of lobbying/corruption).
> In practice though tax cuts usually make rich richer without helping the economy to grow (because of lobbying/corruption).
This is being generous. It's much simpler.
The poor don't pay any federal taxes at all so you can't give them a tax cut because they don't pay any. You can give them a credit at best.
Edit:
Some data
> Another 60.3 million returns showed AGIs of less than $30,000. The average effective tax rate for those taxpayers was 1.5%, even before refundable tax credits were applied.
Right they (the politicians) don't actually think that, they just say that to get cooked projections. Once those revenue projections turn out to be false, it doesn't matter because they already have their tax cuts baked in. Then everyone can blame the other side for deficits and campaign on fixing it. Rinse and repeat.
Let's be clear and not do this both sides thing - by "they" we mean Republicans. You may not agree with their policies or what they want to spend money on, but Democrats (at least in aggregate) live in the real world where they acknowledge for the government to spend money they will have to raise taxes.
Republicans are the only party that in the 21st century acts as though we can simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending and everything will be fine.
As far as I have seen, in federal politics, the majority(left and right) spends, while taxes in general have not been significantly increased or decreased(percentage). What you are talking about is their rhetoric, which may be rhetorical itself.
What does change(and is more important) is Debt/Revenue:
The ratio is looking like it is trending in the right direction. If GDP decreases while nominal tax receipts increase, GDP does not change the debt, while the debt/Revenue ratio looks good for paying bills, while not boding well for economic health.
What is this "real world" you are referring to? There has to be a balance between current and future expenditures and economic health to facilitate these. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
There are two ways to tax the people: By destroying money or by creating money.
Republicans may generally prefer creating money over destroying money, but that doesn't mean they aren't applying taxation. "Tax cuts" in normal speak just means a reduction in how much money is being destroyed. It does not refer to a reduction in your tax burden.
Every good aspect of modern life and modern medicine, technology, etc started with fundamental research that can be made to sound silly.
Some grad student studies the effects of alcohol on fish, learns something new about biology, publishes it so that other students and researchers learn about it, and a few years later after some new studies based on that initial research we get a new cancer drug.
Somebody spends $1 million studying the effects of music on dairy cows, learns that they produce more milk if calming music is played and farmers increase revenues by $10 million per year by adding speakers to their milking rooms.
The billions of dollars spent blowing up infrastructure in the middle east is just a loss, but money spent on research is how we've cured diseases, increased crop yields, launched satellites, and made it so that everyone can have a supercomputer in their pocket that can stream HD video through the air.
> $2 million to create an internship program that resulted in the hiring of one full-time employee at the Department of agriculture
Because the private sector doesn't spend any money on things that don't work out.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
You talk about millions, that's not even a rounding error. Look around you in any private entity, you don't see them spending any tiny fraction on things you don't think are worthwhile?
> $1.7 billion maintaining empty buildings
Assuming they at some point become occupied again, I don't see the issue. The vacancy rate in the private sector isn't anywhere near 0% either.
> In 2021 alone, the government managed to misplace $281 billion in payments
You'll need to be way more specific than 'misplaced'
Then when we look at the $952 billion in interest, a good chunk of that is due to past military spending.
Plus even more - tens of billions of the military nuclear budget is done via the DoE, not the DoD in the budget line.
There's always a hand waving that previous debts accumulated like veteran's benefits and military related debt interest are not military spending, but they obviously are.
No you forgot the wasted spending on Social Security, Medicaid, and other subsidies! See, other people can throw in snide remarks too.
There's room to debate military spending, but if you view the world as a dangerous place and that the US should not become isolationist, we have to spend the money and have equipment ready and capable whether that's in Europe or in Asia. Alternatively we can disband much of the military, stop paying for this stuff, withdraw from NATO, remove overseas bases in countries like Japan and South Korea, and leave the world to deal with its own problems.
Most of that money is wasted on keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy, it's not going into soldier's pockets. And I say this being pro-US and indeed seeing the world as a dangerous place.
But let's not make some bullshit up about a million dollars wasted on some non-sense, when we have real problems with the DoW, which can't even audit itself, sucking up almost a trillion dollars.
> Most of that money is wasted on keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy, it's not going into soldier's pockets. And I say this being pro-US and indeed seeing the world as a dangerous place.
Hi former active duty soldier here - I'm all for generally increasing pay, but you're just making claims here without any basis for them. It cost a lot of money to maintain the industries capable of producing weapons. We can stop the spending, but then they go out of business and now that capability is lost. Look at Europe. Depends on the details. What specific waste are you talking about? Here's [1] an article that came out recently highlighting how much of our explosives and munitions manufacturing is reliant on just a few locations - cut the DoD budget, and then these are the kinds of things that happen.
Secondly, you have no expertise or authority to make claims as to whether we're spending the right amount of money - whether that's too little or too much, without additional specific logic or factual claims. When you say the DoD is sucking up a trillion dollars you're implying that it's all waste - sorry don't think that's true. And when you look at the performance of equipment that other countries provide versus the US, you know our stuff actually works as advertised. Maybe the US is actually spending too little, and other countries are spending proportionally much less on vaporware?
> you have no expertise or authority to make claims as to whether we're spending the right amount of money
To
> Maybe the US is actually spending too little, and other countries are spending proportionally much less on vaporware?
But more on topic, the real question is if this is spending that is worth going into debt for. No family anywhere in the world can sustain a long period of overspending relative to income.
You talk about weapons and stuff but just understand that you're handing over your bargaining power because the rest of the world controls your debt. And at these ratios thats significant leverage.
By now you can win a war without a single shot being fired.
> It's funny you go within a single paragraph from
You made a general, pedestrian claim about spending, I questioned your claim based on what you wrote. That's all. I wouldn't read in to it more than that.
> But more on topic, the real question is if this is spending that is worth going into debt for. No family anywhere in the world can sustain a long period of overspending relative to income.
Sure but then we can just cut in other areas that aren't the military, if that's what we decide to do. You're not making a serious claim that we're overspending.
> You talk about weapons and stuff but just understand that you're handing over your bargaining power because the rest of the world controls your debt. And at these ratios thats significant leverage.
Not really. Most US debt is owed to Americans, and in the circumstances in which we're worried about some other country amassing so much debt that they can leverage us, well, it's a good thing we bought all those ships, planes, and tanks and whatnot so we can fix the issue with kinetic force.
> By now you can win a war without a single shot being fired.
Yea true enough in some cases. I'm not sure I'd disband the US military, withdraw from NATO, relocate US personnel from overseas bases supporting allies in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere under the assumption that maybe we can win a war without any weapons. But I'm certainly interested in your view here.
> No you forgot the wasted spending on Social Security, Medicaid, and other subsidies!
Most of that money ends up being spent in communities (grocery stores etc) and hospitals. So at least that money flows back into a local community.
There's plenty wrong with the US healthcare system, but since the vast majority gets their healthcare through their employer you'll have to come up with something for when they retire or unable to work. That's just an outcome of how the system was set up.
> No you forgot the wasted spending on Social Security [...] See, other people can throw in snide remarks too.
No, snide and wrong is extremely different!
Social Security spending is already funded by a separate tax and currently running a surplus. It's what our legislators are are debt to when use the discretionary budget to let the President start a game of Battleship in the straight of Hormuz.
Snide and wrong! You must be talking about the OP then and not me.
> Social Security spending is already funded by a separate tax and currently running a surplus.
If someone doesn't want to pay in to it, what difference does whether it's fully-funded or not make?
> It's what our legislators are are debt to when use the discretionary budget to let the President start a game of Battleship in the straight of Hormuz.
Or when they enact a pet project you agree with and others disagree with.
I agree but i wouldn't be that upset if that money was spent on soldier's pay and buying things or R/D from US companies built in the United States while employing US citizens. To me, that's a decent tax/spend jobs program. Now, military money flowing overseas and propping up some other economy? There could be valid reasons but that deserves to go under a microscope.
True that the government spends a lot on stuff that it shouldn't, but these examples don't make much of a case. Single-digit millions are not even pocket change here.
But they're still wastes of money, and based on the one-line description provided by the OP, they are rather absurd.
A few others I can think of:
Government insurance/funding for homes destroyed by natural disasters - why am I bailing out Florida homeowners when their home is destroyed by a hurricane? At best you get the first one free and then you're on your own after that.
Billions for highway construction that is not needed, which then costs more to maintain and results in more spending on cars, more deaths, higher costs for insurance, &c.
Various improper payments, billions in subsidies handed out, COVID-19 bailouts and forgiveness
The broad point wasn't wrong. The government does waste money and frankly is pretty damn well-funded.
Quick search says that list is a mix of misleading and untrue.
That said, 1.5 million on goats, 1 on cows, 1.7 million on fish, these are all perfectly reasonable research costs compared to the potential benefit to agriculture on the scale of the USA, well within the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" kind of territory; likewise 5 on an anti-smoking campaign and th health burden of smoking in a nation as big as the USA.
Are you not aware that science research has a positive return on investment to the economy? Consider reviewing https://www.goldengooseaward.org/
Making fun of science that politicians, wanna be politicians, and conservative media don’t remotely understand in order to deflect and hide actual economic problems they cause is a favorite pastime, but is almost always misleading.
The goat yoga thing isn’t true, it’s pure viral talking point made up nonsense. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially if Elon Musk retweets it.
It's likely not politically feasible for a genuine attempt at right-sizing our budget, although we have had attempts (short-lived) in the past. Blaming a political party for this is pointless, although there is a party that has postured as the fiscal adult in the room.
It could be a very messy bubble if/when it collapses, and I think our way out at this point would have to be AI-driven productivity gains. Hopefully Altman's little wish-granting machine ends up being accurate.
Bailing out workers is okay. They are, by definition, the people who have done the work. Bailing out the wealthy, or tax cuts for them is not.
> Basically, America has an economy that is buoyed by AI development and infrastructure spending right now but is poised to pop and the national debt has been ballooned by two to three generations of political leadership failing to properly address underlying issues and instead printing money.
Maybe we shouldn't have spent five decades giving the wealthy tax break after tax break while hollowing out the middle class and suppressing wages with union busting and globalization. Productivity is up ~90% over this time frame, and most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. But here we are. The bill has come due for strip mining the country economically, and taxes will go up to pay down this debt (because only the top ~40% of income earners have enough income to have a federal tax liability). We will fix this eventually through demographic compression (economic growth comes, broadly speaking, from population growth and the US has reached peak population; forward growth will be substantially lower than the past when the population was growing rapidly), politics, and the bond market forcing the US government to raise taxes (“bond vigilantes”).
it won't be the wealthy or cash-under-the-table classes paying these taxes, the increases will be in the income brackets. Which means paycheck receiving working stiffs ( middle and upper-middle class ) and retierees drawing from a 401k/IRA are the ones who will pay just like always.
> Bailing out workers is okay. Bailing out the wealthy, or tax cuts for them is not.
Hell, between PPP and the OBBB tax cuts, rich people are getting $2T over from the YS Governemnt from 2020-2030. It’ll keep happening too, this country is an oligarchy now. Wish it wouldn’t but I don’t see a sea change coming, just further concentration of wealth and power.
There are more than two numbers, so we don't have to force this weird "it's either 0% waste or 100% waste" dichotomy. No one is claiming the Biden admin didn't waste a cent, the claim is that the Trump administration is wasting _orders of magnitude_ more money than the Biden administration.
It always gives me an ominous feeling to see these headlines. It's like we're walking out further and further on a frozen lake. "Hey, it's OK, the ice hasn't cracked yet! Let's keep going!"
This idea is based on the fantasy idea of "it's fine because the US can just inflate away its currency to reduce its debts". This is also often used as an argument for why countries shouldn't join the Euro because they'd be giving up an important tool.
The reality is that purposefully inflating your currency to reduce your debt burden is going to upset your creditors just as much as if you just defaulted on your debts, but will have the added affect of crippling your economy with inflation. Look at how much Americans freaked out over a year or two of 6% yearly inflation. How do you think Americans would respond to 30% *monthly* inflation like in Argentina or Turkey?
It's not like lenders won't notice if the USA tried to print its way out of debt.
> It's not like lenders won't notice if the USA tried to print its way out of debt.
For historical context, this is exactly what happened when the US was on the brink of leaving the gold standard.
> From 1963 to 1966, France secretly implemented Operation Vide-Gousset to repatriate 3,313 tons of gold reserves from the Bank of England and the New York Federal Reserve. It took over 44 boat trips and 129 flights to export the gold back to the Banque de France. Since France converted its dollar holdings into gold, the French made out well when the dollar fell during the Bretton Woods period and lost 96% of its value against gold. France then withdrew from the London Gold Pool in 1966 after recovering its gold holdings to force the US to endure heavier losses.
To be fair, it wasn't 6%. The consumer basket gets manipulated in all sorts of ways, but in general it's just not an accurate representation of day to day impact. Food and housing went up much much higher than 6%.
Whatever the number is, we know for a fact that it was
1. Extremely painful to Americans, and became one of the main pillars of their election.
2. Nowhere near high enough to cause any reduction in the USA's debt burden.
I think modern Americans are way too soft to even imagine the sort of inflation that'd be required to erase their debts. Things have been too good and too stable for too long to understand what country-wide economic hardship would be like, and even if they somehow decided to choose that path, they'd panic quit it long before it was done long enough to have any effect.
1. Markets are aware of that and lend to China accordingly (the ones who are free to choose who to lend to).
2. Do you think Americans would tolerate having a government that purposefully suppresses their purchasing power through structurally low wages, and buying up foreign assets to supress the value of their own currency?
3. The part where China spends all their cash to buy US Treasuries to supress the value of their currency wouldn't really work as well for the USA when international trade is dollar denominated anyways, and the bulk of their GDP comes from domestic consumption.
4. The USA has a deficit. It'd need to borrow even more in order to finance the suppression of their currency, whereas China just redirects the money they earn from export surpluses.
This used to be true, but less so after the US started alienating the rest of the world with tariffs and other erratic behavior. The US military has also been revealed to be incapable of controlling the strait of Hormuz.
Except it's not a bank, it's a country with a few hundred million people that need to work and eat. Once the lenders have a problem, it would already be the end for Americans.
The quiet part you're not supposed to say out loud is the "if you don't use our currency to transact for energy and thereby let us tax it via inflation we'll regime change you" implication it comes with.
Total debt / GDP is the wrong metric for that. There's no limit to the serviceability of debt in a currency you print.
It makes more sense to conceptualise it as the total size of a giant savings account run by the government.
We are walking further out on the ice but that is measured more in other ways - with harder metrics like inflation, access to cheap energy, resources, industrial density and capabilities and access to technology - not this headline number.
Even if we just ignore inflation and other issues, there's still a hard limit because governments don't literally just print money, but sells bonds at market rates. As confidence in the economic stability declines the interest rates the government is required to offer on those bonds trends upward. So right now even 10 year treasuries are selling with just under 5% interest. As a result we're now paying $1.4 trillion per year in interest alone, and that number is going up far faster than the economy is growing. This [1] graph looks quite disconcerting. And it's a vicious cycle. The less confidence there is in the stability of this game, the more the government will have to pay to sell that debt. And the more they have to pay, the more debt they end up needing.
Debt-to-GDP ratio is useful for comparing the debt loads of two countries, but not terribly useful in assessing the serviceability of debt for a single country.
That is, suppose two countries both have $100B in debt. One of them is a small island nation; the other is a global superpower. Obviously the global superpower will be better able to handle that - dividing by GDP helps make that clear.
However, this simple division doesn't tell you some important things. How much of the debt comes due very soon? It's worse if the answer is "most of it." How was it incurred? "Winning a war" is much better than "losing a war."
The United States has lots of debt, and personally I'm worried about the long term serviceability of it. But the ratio to GDP isn't why!
Not an American, but I would argue that this level while little bit of a concern is not a huge issue for a superpower that borrows in its own currency and has the military and economic might to crush any party (sovereign or corporate) attempting move away from that system.
Some of that power comes from things like US Treasuries being rock solid, and this is the sort of thing that could change that. There are other players out there and other ways the world could trade and fiance.
There's a LOT of reasons for them to not want to do that, and the status quo benefits a lot of other powerful players as well, but screwing up treasuries would be a quick way to change that math.
We are still too powerful, but we're squandering that power alarmingly fast. We have destroyed diplomatic soft power. Our software industry used to be able to rely on getting 50% of their revenue outside the US, but we can't be trusted now, and that market can no longer be counted on.
One can get away with being an asshole only so long.
Maybe so, but our weakness is that we depend on new debt to finance our government spending. If investors stopped buying that debt, the US government would have to make sudden, dramatic spending cuts.
And that's not a problem that's solvable with military might! "Investors around the world are declining to buy US government bonds" can't be bombed the way an oil refinery can be.
It's not a problem when other nations borrow in the fiat currency. They're being taught to seek alternative, more tolerable regimes to invest in. Once they establish a better alternative they won't come back.
Bingo! Any country borrowing in its own sovereign currency cannot default on debt in that currency, unless it actively decides to do so for political reasons.
This is a fantasy. Do you really think lenders would just not notice if America inflated its currency away to get rid of its debts, and they'd just say "aw shucks you got us. Anyways, here's a new loan at the same terms as last time." ?
And what about the American public? Look at how much Americans freaked out over a year or two of 6% yearly inflation. How do you think Americans would respond to 30% monthly inflation like in Argentina or Turkey?
Why is this a meaningful figure? It's not debt that matters its how much it costs to finance it. It's Finance 101 that if you manage to borrow below inflation rate, and you have the luck that what you paid for appreciates, then your debt will disappear over time.
On the contrary, trivial amounts of money with usury can ruin you financially.
This Finance 101 perspective is too clever by half.
Sounds like a great idea, right? But what if something out of your control[1] happens, and average interest rates on the debt burden go up from 2% to 14%? The USA can't afford to just pay off all of its debts. It must continuallly roll over it's old debts to new debts, and could easily find itself in a situation where debt servicing costs go up by an order of magnitude if the fiscal situation changes for long enough.
[1] Or in the case of the United States, you do something very stupid and very inside of your control
The US Dollar is chronically over-valued because of its reserve currency status. The US wanted it that way, opposing Keynes proposal of an international clearing union using a clearing currency (which he called the Bancor) that is independent of any specific country. This automatically means that US companies suffer a huge competitive disadvantage which results in an external deficit. The foreign sector accumulates dollar savings. Now the US household sector naturally also runs a surplus. This only leaves the companies and the government which must by logic of sectoral balances run a deficit for the economy not to shrink. The companies are in aggregate also running a surplus since the neoliberal shift and that leaves only one sector that must have a matching deficit if you want to at least keep up economic activity. If the government sector wants to run a surplus that automatically and necessarily must mean that one of the other sectors must run a deficit by logic of accounting. Which one should that be and how do you want to force it to run a deficit? The foreign sector is not an option as long as the US Dollar is the dominant reserve currency because it is overvalued. The households are a natural saver almost always running a surplus. That leaves only the companies to run a deficit. Now how do you get the companies to run a deficit (in aggregate of course, we are not talking about a single company)? You need to make them invest more than they earn. This used to be the role the company sector had until the 70s. Since then we got Thatcher and Reagan with financialization, deregulation, pressure on wages (they fell from about 70% of GDP to about 60%). The government will have to run massive deficits just to keep the economy going unless we roll that back.
The stock and real estate market, huge sources of wealth for the us population, are still near all-time highs and many people, tens of millions at least, have way more real money than they’ve ever had in their lives, and yet a massive number of those people would rather not take a hit to their wealth when it’s easiest to absorb the hit and instead prefer cutting things that even they like the government providing (medicare this week the latest example in an endless number of examples these past months). It really is crazy how wealth-obsessed many Americans are.
And I say that as an absolute hater of how the pols run the place (yes both sides. One for having no sense of how to manage money and the other having some sense but ignoring it; one of these is objectively worse than the other (yep, I said it, objectively!)).
Seems like the end goal is not to have a country left but instead a bunch of factions more likely to be at war fighting over cash, resources and culture issues. Depressing as fuck for those of us not excited about that end goal.
Applies only if you are the reserve currency, label everyone else who don't use your currency the way you want it as currency manipulators and you can take whatever debt you want because well the printer can pay everything back in the future.
Everyone hates regulations until they realize every regulation actually does something. Everyone hates spending until they realize the money goes towards something.
> US 30-year Treasury yields just hit 5.2% — the highest level since July 2007. UK gilt yields are at levels not seen since 1998. Japanese bond yields are at record highs. Something is happening in global bond markets, and it's not just about inflation. In this video I explain what's driving the global rise in long-term borrowing costs, why the era of free money is probably over, and what fiscal dominance means for central bank independence. I cover the history of US presidents fighting with the Federal Reserve — including LBJ shoving his Fed Chair against a wall — the 1970s UK economic collapse, the Liz Truss mini-budget crisis, the role of private credit and off-balance-sheet SPVs in financing the AI boom, and what all of this means for the new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh.
The entire world is super leveraged at levels generally seen during major recessions or wars.
And that's excluding the huge amount of multi tiered private credit.
While this is not an indication of anything bad on its own it definitely creates the conditions for cataclysms.
It's like being on a very very dry hay field, it does not mean that you're bound to die on fire, it just means that the risks of a fire being extremely destructive are high.
On the bright side it isn't growing and is down from the pandemic-era 132% of GDP. (Although maybe that was because GDP shrank rather than any change in fundamental debt.)
I think you're being sarcastic, but can't quite tell.
If you're not - this is the 10th worst ratio in the world. The only countries worse are: Venezuela, Japan, Sudan, Singapore, Eritrea, Bahrain, Greece, Lebanon, and Italy. The difference has historically been that we've been able to exploit the dollar, export our inflation, and so on - but those times are fading.
AI industry profits have and will continue to be privatized while the enormous costs of job displacement (to name just one of many negative externalities) will be gleefully socialized. We've seen this film before.
Haha, so you can bribe the President? I hope this comment is satire.
The "masses" are well aware of crypto at this point and BTC is down 47% over this past year. It's just not that useful unless you're trying to skirt laws/regulations[1] or LARPing as a sovereign citizen.
1: Yes, I know, BTC is not even good pick for financial crimes either.
just want to say, whether you like the name/admin or not those accounts are a very good deal. Setting up one for a new born is a get-out-financial-mistakes (cc/student loan debt etc) free card when they grow up and get access to the money. If you're smart and can make some decent deposits in the first year or two that could easily become a buy-a-house-for-free card which would be an absolute treasure for kickstarting a young person's financial life.
It's too late for my kids but if i'm ever lucky enough to have grandkids part of their bday and Christmas gifts will be deposits.
An executive order declaring a newly created legal entity is now the holder of all previous debt. The new entity has no assets or revenues, other than Trumpcoin.
Upsetting how we are reaching these lows while the administration is accusing everyone else of wasting taxpayer money except for themselves. At least under previous administrations you would get something for your money, like science funding and healthcare for the needy, not just bombing runs and posturing.
Both can be true. The previous administration bailed out the unfunded pension funds of cities and state employees when they did Covid-19 bailouts despite it having nothing to do with Covid-19 and without requiring these local governments to properly fund these pensions moving forward. They bailed these pension programs out many times more than their financial support for restaurants they forced closed. Basically, America has an economy that is buoyed by AI development and infrastructure spending right now but is poised to pop and the national debt has been ballooned by two to three generations of political leadership failing to properly address underlying issues and instead printing money.
The problem is that half the political system thinks you can cut taxes and grow revenues.
Which is an intentional strategy to repeal social programs that they’d never get the votes to do so via legislation
It's a difficult tradeoff. By taxing more and more it's easy to send the economy into the death spiral so to grow the revenue without killing the economy you need economic growth. Cutting taxes will not give the growth aromatically but carefully designed tax system with low taxes where it helps should be a part of the strategy.
In practice though tax cuts usually make rich richer without helping the economy to grow (because of lobbying/corruption).
> In practice though tax cuts usually make rich richer without helping the economy to grow (because of lobbying/corruption).
This is being generous. It's much simpler.
The poor don't pay any federal taxes at all so you can't give them a tax cut because they don't pay any. You can give them a credit at best.
Edit:
Some data
> Another 60.3 million returns showed AGIs of less than $30,000. The average effective tax rate for those taxpayers was 1.5%, even before refundable tax credits were applied.
From: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-...
Right they (the politicians) don't actually think that, they just say that to get cooked projections. Once those revenue projections turn out to be false, it doesn't matter because they already have their tax cuts baked in. Then everyone can blame the other side for deficits and campaign on fixing it. Rinse and repeat.
Let's be clear and not do this both sides thing - by "they" we mean Republicans. You may not agree with their policies or what they want to spend money on, but Democrats (at least in aggregate) live in the real world where they acknowledge for the government to spend money they will have to raise taxes.
Republicans are the only party that in the 21st century acts as though we can simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending and everything will be fine.
As far as I have seen, in federal politics, the majority(left and right) spends, while taxes in general have not been significantly increased or decreased(percentage). What you are talking about is their rhetoric, which may be rhetorical itself.
What does change(and is more important) is Debt/Revenue:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=TZfm
The ratio is looking like it is trending in the right direction. If GDP decreases while nominal tax receipts increase, GDP does not change the debt, while the debt/Revenue ratio looks good for paying bills, while not boding well for economic health.
What is this "real world" you are referring to? There has to be a balance between current and future expenditures and economic health to facilitate these. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
There are two ways to tax the people: By destroying money or by creating money.
Republicans may generally prefer creating money over destroying money, but that doesn't mean they aren't applying taxation. "Tax cuts" in normal speak just means a reduction in how much money is being destroyed. It does not refer to a reduction in your tax burden.
The problem is not that we aren’t taxed enough— it’s that our government lights cash on fire
Here is some absurd garbage your US taxes paid for:
•$1.5 Million studying the effects of yoga on goats
•$1.7 billion maintaining empty buildings
•$5 million on a campaign to promote an alternative music scene to get hipsters to stop smoking
•$2 million to create an internship program that resulted in the hiring of one full-time employee at the Department of agriculture
•In 2021 alone, the government managed to misplace $281 billion in payments
•$1 million studying the effects of music on dairy cows
•$1.7 million to study the effects of alcohol on fish
Every good aspect of modern life and modern medicine, technology, etc started with fundamental research that can be made to sound silly.
Some grad student studies the effects of alcohol on fish, learns something new about biology, publishes it so that other students and researchers learn about it, and a few years later after some new studies based on that initial research we get a new cancer drug.
Somebody spends $1 million studying the effects of music on dairy cows, learns that they produce more milk if calming music is played and farmers increase revenues by $10 million per year by adding speakers to their milking rooms.
The billions of dollars spent blowing up infrastructure in the middle east is just a loss, but money spent on research is how we've cured diseases, increased crop yields, launched satellites, and made it so that everyone can have a supercomputer in their pocket that can stream HD video through the air.
Studying bacterial scum in Yellowstone Park -> The effectiveness of modern Polymerase Chain Reaction tests in medicine and biology.
> $2 million to create an internship program that resulted in the hiring of one full-time employee at the Department of agriculture
Because the private sector doesn't spend any money on things that don't work out.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
You talk about millions, that's not even a rounding error. Look around you in any private entity, you don't see them spending any tiny fraction on things you don't think are worthwhile?
> $1.7 billion maintaining empty buildings
Assuming they at some point become occupied again, I don't see the issue. The vacancy rate in the private sector isn't anywhere near 0% either.
> In 2021 alone, the government managed to misplace $281 billion in payments
You'll need to be way more specific than 'misplaced'
You made a tiny mistake, you forgot the $800 billion for the military!
Even more
$859 billion to DoD
$339 billion Veterans benefits
Then when we look at the $952 billion in interest, a good chunk of that is due to past military spending.
Plus even more - tens of billions of the military nuclear budget is done via the DoE, not the DoD in the budget line.
There's always a hand waving that previous debts accumulated like veteran's benefits and military related debt interest are not military spending, but they obviously are.
No you forgot the wasted spending on Social Security, Medicaid, and other subsidies! See, other people can throw in snide remarks too.
There's room to debate military spending, but if you view the world as a dangerous place and that the US should not become isolationist, we have to spend the money and have equipment ready and capable whether that's in Europe or in Asia. Alternatively we can disband much of the military, stop paying for this stuff, withdraw from NATO, remove overseas bases in countries like Japan and South Korea, and leave the world to deal with its own problems.
Most of that money is wasted on keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy, it's not going into soldier's pockets. And I say this being pro-US and indeed seeing the world as a dangerous place.
But let's not make some bullshit up about a million dollars wasted on some non-sense, when we have real problems with the DoW, which can't even audit itself, sucking up almost a trillion dollars.
> Most of that money is wasted on keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy, it's not going into soldier's pockets. And I say this being pro-US and indeed seeing the world as a dangerous place.
Hi former active duty soldier here - I'm all for generally increasing pay, but you're just making claims here without any basis for them. It cost a lot of money to maintain the industries capable of producing weapons. We can stop the spending, but then they go out of business and now that capability is lost. Look at Europe. Depends on the details. What specific waste are you talking about? Here's [1] an article that came out recently highlighting how much of our explosives and munitions manufacturing is reliant on just a few locations - cut the DoD budget, and then these are the kinds of things that happen.
Secondly, you have no expertise or authority to make claims as to whether we're spending the right amount of money - whether that's too little or too much, without additional specific logic or factual claims. When you say the DoD is sucking up a trillion dollars you're implying that it's all waste - sorry don't think that's true. And when you look at the performance of equipment that other countries provide versus the US, you know our stuff actually works as advertised. Maybe the US is actually spending too little, and other countries are spending proportionally much less on vaporware?
[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/western-powers-race-to-brin...
It's funny you go within a single paragraph from
> you have no expertise or authority to make claims as to whether we're spending the right amount of money
To
> Maybe the US is actually spending too little, and other countries are spending proportionally much less on vaporware?
But more on topic, the real question is if this is spending that is worth going into debt for. No family anywhere in the world can sustain a long period of overspending relative to income.
You talk about weapons and stuff but just understand that you're handing over your bargaining power because the rest of the world controls your debt. And at these ratios thats significant leverage.
By now you can win a war without a single shot being fired.
> It's funny you go within a single paragraph from
You made a general, pedestrian claim about spending, I questioned your claim based on what you wrote. That's all. I wouldn't read in to it more than that.
> But more on topic, the real question is if this is spending that is worth going into debt for. No family anywhere in the world can sustain a long period of overspending relative to income.
Sure but then we can just cut in other areas that aren't the military, if that's what we decide to do. You're not making a serious claim that we're overspending.
> You talk about weapons and stuff but just understand that you're handing over your bargaining power because the rest of the world controls your debt. And at these ratios thats significant leverage.
Not really. Most US debt is owed to Americans, and in the circumstances in which we're worried about some other country amassing so much debt that they can leverage us, well, it's a good thing we bought all those ships, planes, and tanks and whatnot so we can fix the issue with kinetic force.
> By now you can win a war without a single shot being fired.
Yea true enough in some cases. I'm not sure I'd disband the US military, withdraw from NATO, relocate US personnel from overseas bases supporting allies in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere under the assumption that maybe we can win a war without any weapons. But I'm certainly interested in your view here.
> No you forgot the wasted spending on Social Security, Medicaid, and other subsidies!
Most of that money ends up being spent in communities (grocery stores etc) and hospitals. So at least that money flows back into a local community.
There's plenty wrong with the US healthcare system, but since the vast majority gets their healthcare through their employer you'll have to come up with something for when they retire or unable to work. That's just an outcome of how the system was set up.
> No you forgot the wasted spending on Social Security [...] See, other people can throw in snide remarks too.
No, snide and wrong is extremely different!
Social Security spending is already funded by a separate tax and currently running a surplus. It's what our legislators are are debt to when use the discretionary budget to let the President start a game of Battleship in the straight of Hormuz.
> No, snide and wrong is extremely different!
Snide and wrong! You must be talking about the OP then and not me.
> Social Security spending is already funded by a separate tax and currently running a surplus.
If someone doesn't want to pay in to it, what difference does whether it's fully-funded or not make?
> It's what our legislators are are debt to when use the discretionary budget to let the President start a game of Battleship in the straight of Hormuz.
Or when they enact a pet project you agree with and others disagree with.
> you forgot the $800 billion for the military!
I agree but i wouldn't be that upset if that money was spent on soldier's pay and buying things or R/D from US companies built in the United States while employing US citizens. To me, that's a decent tax/spend jobs program. Now, military money flowing overseas and propping up some other economy? There could be valid reasons but that deserves to go under a microscope.
1.5 trillion next year!
True that the government spends a lot on stuff that it shouldn't, but these examples don't make much of a case. Single-digit millions are not even pocket change here.
But they're still wastes of money, and based on the one-line description provided by the OP, they are rather absurd.
A few others I can think of:
The broad point wasn't wrong. The government does waste money and frankly is pretty damn well-funded.Name a huge organization that doesn’t waste money. I’ll give you as much time as you need.
"All organizations waste money, therefore organizations should keep wasting money and it's actually fine" doesn't sound very compelling to me.
Quick search says that list is a mix of misleading and untrue.
That said, 1.5 million on goats, 1 on cows, 1.7 million on fish, these are all perfectly reasonable research costs compared to the potential benefit to agriculture on the scale of the USA, well within the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" kind of territory; likewise 5 on an anti-smoking campaign and th health burden of smoking in a nation as big as the USA.
Any sources on the $1.5M effects of yoga on goats study? Google nor ChatGPT could find anything.
Are you not aware that science research has a positive return on investment to the economy? Consider reviewing https://www.goldengooseaward.org/
Making fun of science that politicians, wanna be politicians, and conservative media don’t remotely understand in order to deflect and hide actual economic problems they cause is a favorite pastime, but is almost always misleading.
The goat yoga thing isn’t true, it’s pure viral talking point made up nonsense. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially if Elon Musk retweets it.
It's likely not politically feasible for a genuine attempt at right-sizing our budget, although we have had attempts (short-lived) in the past. Blaming a political party for this is pointless, although there is a party that has postured as the fiscal adult in the room.
It could be a very messy bubble if/when it collapses, and I think our way out at this point would have to be AI-driven productivity gains. Hopefully Altman's little wish-granting machine ends up being accurate.
Bailing out workers is okay. They are, by definition, the people who have done the work. Bailing out the wealthy, or tax cuts for them is not.
> Basically, America has an economy that is buoyed by AI development and infrastructure spending right now but is poised to pop and the national debt has been ballooned by two to three generations of political leadership failing to properly address underlying issues and instead printing money.
Maybe we shouldn't have spent five decades giving the wealthy tax break after tax break while hollowing out the middle class and suppressing wages with union busting and globalization. Productivity is up ~90% over this time frame, and most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. But here we are. The bill has come due for strip mining the country economically, and taxes will go up to pay down this debt (because only the top ~40% of income earners have enough income to have a federal tax liability). We will fix this eventually through demographic compression (economic growth comes, broadly speaking, from population growth and the US has reached peak population; forward growth will be substantially lower than the past when the population was growing rapidly), politics, and the bond market forcing the US government to raise taxes (“bond vigilantes”).
> forcing the US government to raise taxes.
it won't be the wealthy or cash-under-the-table classes paying these taxes, the increases will be in the income brackets. Which means paycheck receiving working stiffs ( middle and upper-middle class ) and retierees drawing from a 401k/IRA are the ones who will pay just like always.
> Bailing out workers is okay. Bailing out the wealthy, or tax cuts for them is not.
Hell, between PPP and the OBBB tax cuts, rich people are getting $2T over from the YS Governemnt from 2020-2030. It’ll keep happening too, this country is an oligarchy now. Wish it wouldn’t but I don’t see a sea change coming, just further concentration of wealth and power.
There are more than two numbers, so we don't have to force this weird "it's either 0% waste or 100% waste" dichotomy. No one is claiming the Biden admin didn't waste a cent, the claim is that the Trump administration is wasting _orders of magnitude_ more money than the Biden administration.
It always gives me an ominous feeling to see these headlines. It's like we're walking out further and further on a frozen lake. "Hey, it's OK, the ice hasn't cracked yet! Let's keep going!"
I think that's a pretty solid (pun intended) metaphor.
Past performance is not a predictor of future returns.
I've always heard people say that the US debt doesn't matter when the debt itself is denominated in USD.
It's the old saying, if you owe the bank $1,000 then you have a problem. But if you owe the bank a trillion dollars then the bank has a problem.
Especially when that trillion dollars was spent on an insane fleet of aircraft carriers.
This idea is based on the fantasy idea of "it's fine because the US can just inflate away its currency to reduce its debts". This is also often used as an argument for why countries shouldn't join the Euro because they'd be giving up an important tool.
The reality is that purposefully inflating your currency to reduce your debt burden is going to upset your creditors just as much as if you just defaulted on your debts, but will have the added affect of crippling your economy with inflation. Look at how much Americans freaked out over a year or two of 6% yearly inflation. How do you think Americans would respond to 30% *monthly* inflation like in Argentina or Turkey?
It's not like lenders won't notice if the USA tried to print its way out of debt.
> It's not like lenders won't notice if the USA tried to print its way out of debt.
For historical context, this is exactly what happened when the US was on the brink of leaving the gold standard.
> From 1963 to 1966, France secretly implemented Operation Vide-Gousset to repatriate 3,313 tons of gold reserves from the Bank of England and the New York Federal Reserve. It took over 44 boat trips and 129 flights to export the gold back to the Banque de France. Since France converted its dollar holdings into gold, the French made out well when the dollar fell during the Bretton Woods period and lost 96% of its value against gold. France then withdrew from the London Gold Pool in 1966 after recovering its gold holdings to force the US to endure heavier losses.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/preciou...
To be fair, it wasn't 6%. The consumer basket gets manipulated in all sorts of ways, but in general it's just not an accurate representation of day to day impact. Food and housing went up much much higher than 6%.
Whatever the number is, we know for a fact that it was
1. Extremely painful to Americans, and became one of the main pillars of their election.
2. Nowhere near high enough to cause any reduction in the USA's debt burden.
I think modern Americans are way too soft to even imagine the sort of inflation that'd be required to erase their debts. Things have been too good and too stable for too long to understand what country-wide economic hardship would be like, and even if they somehow decided to choose that path, they'd panic quit it long before it was done long enough to have any effect.
currency manipulation seems to be working for China though.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm751
1. Markets are aware of that and lend to China accordingly (the ones who are free to choose who to lend to).
2. Do you think Americans would tolerate having a government that purposefully suppresses their purchasing power through structurally low wages, and buying up foreign assets to supress the value of their own currency?
3. The part where China spends all their cash to buy US Treasuries to supress the value of their currency wouldn't really work as well for the USA when international trade is dollar denominated anyways, and the bulk of their GDP comes from domestic consumption.
4. The USA has a deficit. It'd need to borrow even more in order to finance the suppression of their currency, whereas China just redirects the money they earn from export surpluses.
This used to be true, but less so after the US started alienating the rest of the world with tariffs and other erratic behavior. The US military has also been revealed to be incapable of controlling the strait of Hormuz.
Except it's not a bank, it's a country with a few hundred million people that need to work and eat. Once the lenders have a problem, it would already be the end for Americans.
The quiet part you're not supposed to say out loud is the "if you don't use our currency to transact for energy and thereby let us tax it via inflation we'll regime change you" implication it comes with.
end is probably ww btw. so are you all ready? last time it did work and lost of war debt was paid
Total debt / GDP is the wrong metric for that. There's no limit to the serviceability of debt in a currency you print.
It makes more sense to conceptualise it as the total size of a giant savings account run by the government.
We are walking further out on the ice but that is measured more in other ways - with harder metrics like inflation, access to cheap energy, resources, industrial density and capabilities and access to technology - not this headline number.
Even if we just ignore inflation and other issues, there's still a hard limit because governments don't literally just print money, but sells bonds at market rates. As confidence in the economic stability declines the interest rates the government is required to offer on those bonds trends upward. So right now even 10 year treasuries are selling with just under 5% interest. As a result we're now paying $1.4 trillion per year in interest alone, and that number is going up far faster than the economy is growing. This [1] graph looks quite disconcerting. And it's a vicious cycle. The less confidence there is in the stability of this game, the more the government will have to pay to sell that debt. And the more they have to pay, the more debt they end up needing.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A180RC1A027NBEA
Debt-to-GDP ratio is useful for comparing the debt loads of two countries, but not terribly useful in assessing the serviceability of debt for a single country.
That is, suppose two countries both have $100B in debt. One of them is a small island nation; the other is a global superpower. Obviously the global superpower will be better able to handle that - dividing by GDP helps make that clear.
However, this simple division doesn't tell you some important things. How much of the debt comes due very soon? It's worse if the answer is "most of it." How was it incurred? "Winning a war" is much better than "losing a war."
The United States has lots of debt, and personally I'm worried about the long term serviceability of it. But the ratio to GDP isn't why!
But the doesn't come due. So long as you can cough up the interests.
There are short term and long term bonds.
Not an American, but I would argue that this level while little bit of a concern is not a huge issue for a superpower that borrows in its own currency and has the military and economic might to crush any party (sovereign or corporate) attempting move away from that system.
You guys are too powerful.
Some of that power comes from things like US Treasuries being rock solid, and this is the sort of thing that could change that. There are other players out there and other ways the world could trade and fiance.
There's a LOT of reasons for them to not want to do that, and the status quo benefits a lot of other powerful players as well, but screwing up treasuries would be a quick way to change that math.
We are still too powerful, but we're squandering that power alarmingly fast. We have destroyed diplomatic soft power. Our software industry used to be able to rely on getting 50% of their revenue outside the US, but we can't be trusted now, and that market can no longer be counted on.
One can get away with being an asshole only so long.
Maybe so, but our weakness is that we depend on new debt to finance our government spending. If investors stopped buying that debt, the US government would have to make sudden, dramatic spending cuts.
And that's not a problem that's solvable with military might! "Investors around the world are declining to buy US government bonds" can't be bombed the way an oil refinery can be.
Reserve status is based on confidence. The US can't bomb markets into trusting the dollar. They've already begun diversifying away from it.
It's not a problem when other nations borrow in the fiat currency. They're being taught to seek alternative, more tolerable regimes to invest in. Once they establish a better alternative they won't come back.
We seem to be lacking in military might lately, and are increasingly losing economic might.
Some things feel impossible until they happen.
Bingo! Any country borrowing in its own sovereign currency cannot default on debt in that currency, unless it actively decides to do so for political reasons.
Sure, but it can still have hyperinflation.
This is a fantasy. Do you really think lenders would just not notice if America inflated its currency away to get rid of its debts, and they'd just say "aw shucks you got us. Anyways, here's a new loan at the same terms as last time." ?
And what about the American public? Look at how much Americans freaked out over a year or two of 6% yearly inflation. How do you think Americans would respond to 30% monthly inflation like in Argentina or Turkey?
Why is this a meaningful figure? It's not debt that matters its how much it costs to finance it. It's Finance 101 that if you manage to borrow below inflation rate, and you have the luck that what you paid for appreciates, then your debt will disappear over time.
On the contrary, trivial amounts of money with usury can ruin you financially.
This Finance 101 perspective is too clever by half.
Sounds like a great idea, right? But what if something out of your control[1] happens, and average interest rates on the debt burden go up from 2% to 14%? The USA can't afford to just pay off all of its debts. It must continuallly roll over it's old debts to new debts, and could easily find itself in a situation where debt servicing costs go up by an order of magnitude if the fiscal situation changes for long enough.
[1] Or in the case of the United States, you do something very stupid and very inside of your control
The US Dollar is chronically over-valued because of its reserve currency status. The US wanted it that way, opposing Keynes proposal of an international clearing union using a clearing currency (which he called the Bancor) that is independent of any specific country. This automatically means that US companies suffer a huge competitive disadvantage which results in an external deficit. The foreign sector accumulates dollar savings. Now the US household sector naturally also runs a surplus. This only leaves the companies and the government which must by logic of sectoral balances run a deficit for the economy not to shrink. The companies are in aggregate also running a surplus since the neoliberal shift and that leaves only one sector that must have a matching deficit if you want to at least keep up economic activity. If the government sector wants to run a surplus that automatically and necessarily must mean that one of the other sectors must run a deficit by logic of accounting. Which one should that be and how do you want to force it to run a deficit? The foreign sector is not an option as long as the US Dollar is the dominant reserve currency because it is overvalued. The households are a natural saver almost always running a surplus. That leaves only the companies to run a deficit. Now how do you get the companies to run a deficit (in aggregate of course, we are not talking about a single company)? You need to make them invest more than they earn. This used to be the role the company sector had until the 70s. Since then we got Thatcher and Reagan with financialization, deregulation, pressure on wages (they fell from about 70% of GDP to about 60%). The government will have to run massive deficits just to keep the economy going unless we roll that back.
Slaps the hood of a cybertruck
This bad boy can hold a LOT of debt.
This country is a cybertruck.
Wait, I thought we were a gun.
You are Brian Bilston, and I claim my £5
...stuck in a half inch of snow on a public road.
The stock and real estate market, huge sources of wealth for the us population, are still near all-time highs and many people, tens of millions at least, have way more real money than they’ve ever had in their lives, and yet a massive number of those people would rather not take a hit to their wealth when it’s easiest to absorb the hit and instead prefer cutting things that even they like the government providing (medicare this week the latest example in an endless number of examples these past months). It really is crazy how wealth-obsessed many Americans are.
And I say that as an absolute hater of how the pols run the place (yes both sides. One for having no sense of how to manage money and the other having some sense but ignoring it; one of these is objectively worse than the other (yep, I said it, objectively!)).
Seems like the end goal is not to have a country left but instead a bunch of factions more likely to be at war fighting over cash, resources and culture issues. Depressing as fuck for those of us not excited about that end goal.
Let the market decide
Applies only if you are the reserve currency, label everyone else who don't use your currency the way you want it as currency manipulators and you can take whatever debt you want because well the printer can pay everything back in the future.
The wisdom was that the US dollar due to its exorbitant privilege (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Origin) can afford these debts.
Countries put up with it because the US "provided protection" and insured maritime freedom of navigation. Oh wait ...
Dangerously close to discovering the premise of Accidental Superpower from first principles.
Japan is at well over 200%, and has a very real population crisis. Italy is 138%, France is at 117%, Canada is at 110%. UK and China are around 100%.
123% comparatively speaking isn't great, but it's not shockingly terrible.
Everyone hates regulations until they realize every regulation actually does something. Everyone hates spending until they realize the money goes towards something.
None of this will get solved until a crisis
This Is Probably Fine! by Patrick Boyle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nvsDmwZWdM - May 29th, 2026
> US 30-year Treasury yields just hit 5.2% — the highest level since July 2007. UK gilt yields are at levels not seen since 1998. Japanese bond yields are at record highs. Something is happening in global bond markets, and it's not just about inflation. In this video I explain what's driving the global rise in long-term borrowing costs, why the era of free money is probably over, and what fiscal dominance means for central bank independence. I cover the history of US presidents fighting with the Federal Reserve — including LBJ shoving his Fed Chair against a wall — the 1970s UK economic collapse, the Liz Truss mini-budget crisis, the role of private credit and off-balance-sheet SPVs in financing the AI boom, and what all of this means for the new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh.
The entire world is super leveraged at levels generally seen during major recessions or wars.
And that's excluding the huge amount of multi tiered private credit.
While this is not an indication of anything bad on its own it definitely creates the conditions for cataclysms.
It's like being on a very very dry hay field, it does not mean that you're bound to die on fire, it just means that the risks of a fire being extremely destructive are high.
On the bright side it isn't growing and is down from the pandemic-era 132% of GDP. (Although maybe that was because GDP shrank rather than any change in fundamental debt.)
The GDP was a little smaler during Covid. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP/
Are we looking at the same graph?
It appeared to drop from the 2020 highs, yes.
But it's definitely trending upward.
This still isn’t too bad compared to other countries, also, most of the AI industry profits are still yet to be fully realized.
I think you're being sarcastic, but can't quite tell.
If you're not - this is the 10th worst ratio in the world. The only countries worse are: Venezuela, Japan, Sudan, Singapore, Eritrea, Bahrain, Greece, Lebanon, and Italy. The difference has historically been that we've been able to exploit the dollar, export our inflation, and so on - but those times are fading.
No, those times are not fading. We are constantly opening up new revenue streams, like Venezuela, and maybe soon Iran too.
AI industry profits have and will continue to be privatized while the enormous costs of job displacement (to name just one of many negative externalities) will be gleefully socialized. We've seen this film before.
Assuming it doesn't mirror the dotcom bubble
time to buy bitcoin
If you think bitcoin will hold value as economies are collapsing, I have some beachfront property to sell you.
...Actually I have an NFT of some beachfront property.
Haha, so you can bribe the President? I hope this comment is satire.
The "masses" are well aware of crypto at this point and BTC is down 47% over this past year. It's just not that useful unless you're trying to skirt laws/regulations[1] or LARPing as a sovereign citizen.
1: Yes, I know, BTC is not even good pick for financial crimes either.
Sounds like you should short it then!
Pardons go for $3M these days.
I wonder what the exit plan is. One time conversion of social security into Trump accounts and call it a day?
just want to say, whether you like the name/admin or not those accounts are a very good deal. Setting up one for a new born is a get-out-financial-mistakes (cc/student loan debt etc) free card when they grow up and get access to the money. If you're smart and can make some decent deposits in the first year or two that could easily become a buy-a-house-for-free card which would be an absolute treasure for kickstarting a young person's financial life.
It's too late for my kids but if i'm ever lucky enough to have grandkids part of their bday and Christmas gifts will be deposits.
An executive order declaring a newly created legal entity is now the holder of all previous debt. The new entity has no assets or revenues, other than Trumpcoin.
Load all of your debt onto another enormous country. Go to war with them, make debt elimination one of the terms of peace
I remember something, like gold taken from Iraq.