Rand Paul does the Trump math: “I’m for looking at the entitlements, the waste, everything because it’s such an enormous problem that if you put military off the table, you put entitlements off the table, all you have left is 16% of the budget. If you eliminate that, you don’t get anywhere close.”
Note: Rand Paul is a turd.
modifying slightly
Rand Paul is a Johnny One Note
though..even that, it does seem to work for him every election, So go figure.
I saw this article on the Trump govt intending to buy bitcoin and remembered your musings on this.
“Yes, I think so,” Trump said in response to a question about whether the U.S. will create a bitcoin strategic reserve similar to its oil reserve.
We discussed the US buying bitcoin in the authoritarian government thread a little. This is a naked buyout of tech bros for their personal enrichment. I think this is a horrible government intervention in crypto, something that allegedly is supposed to be free of government meddling.
Good time to crash the economy.
Great time for cutting taxes for the wealthy a few trillion.
Only the UK, of the G7 countries, pays higher interest rates than the US on their 10 year government bonds. Even Canada has rates about 1.2% lower than the US but Canada will need to borrow massively in future years to invest in infrastructure and industrial restructuring as we reposition ourselves away from the US.
That’s a good way to end up in prison in El Salvador.
I’ve said it many times: debt is the biggest issue in the US right now. We need a Constitutional Amendment requiring a balanced budget, so that no new debt is incurred.
Can I retroactively 100% agree with this statement up until January 20th 2025?
Too simplistic, and in any event that logic should persist beyond federal govt debt. I posted last year when the total debt in the USA passed the $100 tr mark. That means the Fed debt is a minor component.
Debt is not “bad”.. debt is money. Money is not “bad”. Every debt creates a corresponding asset somewhere. That how accounting works. It’s not mysterious.
The issue is what the debt is used for. If it is used to create a productive asset, then it’s probably good. If it’s used to increase consumption, then it is probably bad. Some things get grey, like marketing costs that enhance pricing options, it can be argued that is an asset. Buying dinners at a restaurant is most likely bad debt.
If the fed govt is creating assets - hydro electric dams, mass transit, national parks,etc - then it’s not serious. If it’s creating lower taxes or put on parades, .well that’s a bad debt.
These blanket condemnations of debt are ill informed.
I’m pretty sure that we can look at the budget and see that we aren’t creating more productive assets today than were were back when the debt/deficit wasn’t so high.
So I’m going with “bad”.
Yup. And that is the problem.
When we build roads, schools, ports…I don’t mind the debt. In the end it just lowers the every day costs for all of us. We, the people, own those assets collectively. If we don’t own them, and if there is a demand, then private interests own them and we all pay rent.
Too many parades.
And in a related note, where the hell are the public buildings? In the Gilded Age, we had ruthless capitalists. But they had a sense of public duty. Carnegie libraries, museums, Uni of Chicago &Vanderbilt. How come our billionaires are so selfish?
They gave us Trump 2.0.
The debt isn’t the problem per se, the interest cost is…
Of course, then there was this:
Here’s a simple example of losing a govt asset and how it costs us in the end. Sate university systems.
States got in trouble for a Zillion reasons. Pensions, bad city planning, regressive taxes. Take your pick. So those states decided to reduce education funding to those systems. The universities had to operate more like a business and at least try to work with less public tax dollars.
So the state tuitions went up. And up. And up. And pretty soon some knucklehead extolled the virtue of non cancellable student debt. We can just keep on charging more and have those students pay it over time. Now only the rich can expect their kids to leave without debt.
And voila! We create debt instead of paying a few extra dollars in state taxes. Brilliant?
Failure to fund the upkeep on an asset is not a great idea. You don’t create wealth that way.
