The U.S. debt now approaches $35 trillion. That means every American owes $100,000.
President Joe Biden’s administration doesn’t care. they want to spend more.
They’re already spending so much that they’re adding to our debt mega $1 every 100 days.
President Donald Trump isn’t much better. His administration has increased our debt by nearly $8 trillion.
This is not going to end well.
Last year, we reached an ugly new milestone: Americans must pay $1 trillion a year to get interest On our debt.
That’s more than we spend on defense on infrastructure, education, poverty programs, and everything else except Social Security and Medicare.
If we didn’t waste those trillions on interest, we could give every man, woman and child a $3,000 tax break to spend however they want.
Worse, U.S. spending growth is unsustainable. You can stretch the rubber band farther and farther, but eventually it will break.
This column has a long history of reporting on irresponsible behavior by politicians.
In 2019, I complained that our debt was increasing by a trillion dollars a year. But now, it’s three trillion!
In 2023, rating agency Fitch was criticized for downgrading U.S. government debt. But a few months later, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded its outlook to “negative” from “stable,” saying the U.S. “fiscal deficit will remain very large, severely undermining debt sustainability.”
No one knows which straw will break the camel’s back.
In the past, politicians at least talked about About our debt problem.
President Bill Clinton said: “We have to solve this huge long-term debt problem or it will haunt us.”
US President Obama said it would be “irresponsible” not to address the issue.
“We have to get rid of $19 trillion in debt,” Trump said.
But none of them did anything about it.
Now they lied about it. “We did cut the federal debt in half,” President Joe Biden said.
This is ridiculous. When he took office, our debt was $26.9 trillion. It is now $34.8 trillion.
Part of the problem is that Biden’s staff has listened to “Modern Monetary Theory” advocates, the absurd idea that the United States can spend more because it prints its own currency.
“There’s nothing stopping the federal government,” said Stephanie Kelter, an economic adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (R-Vt.), “from creating money and paying it to someone it wants.”
This is crazy. Look what happened in the countries that tried it.
After World War I, the German government was unable to pay war reparations, so it printed more money. This led to 300% inflation and sparked outrage that laid the foundation for Hitler.
Similar hyperinflation has devastated life in Argentina, Zimbabwe and, most recently, Venezuela.
People work their entire lives to accumulate savings; politicians steal it through inflation.
Today, fools like Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) say we can “solve” our deficit by taxing the rich.
The stock market has risen nearly 30,000 points in 15 years, and there are many ridiculously wealthy people around.
“Pay your fair share,” Warren shouted.
But the rich already pay a greater share, and raising taxes on the rich won’t even get us out of this mess.
First, many people are unwilling to pay. They move or invest abroad, or spend more money on tax lawyers to circumvent the rules.
Even if they don’t, there aren’t enough wealthy people taxing us to compensate our politicians for their spending. If Warren could catch all The wealth of billionaires only covers about one-seventh of our debt.
The only solution is to address the root cause of debt in the first place: excessive government spending.
This shouldn’t be that hard. Politicians don’t even need to stop spending more. They don’t need to balance the budget.
They only need to limit spending increases to about 4%, slightly below the average annual U.S. economic growth rate. Then we can develop our way out of the debt burden.
But our politicians won’t even do that.
They don’t even talk about debt.
They are irresponsible cowards.
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