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Pretty sure the bond market warning that was sent was “don’t fuck up the international world order by doing stupid shit like trying to take over NATO allies”. That’s when everybody started offloading bonds. There’s no faith in US leadership or for US to be a reliable and responsible party on the international stage.
They're tied together. The same guy that is upending the international order is also trying to fire the FED governors and install his puppets. It looks like SCOTUS will protect the FED, and Trump ended up pulling another TACO on Greenland. But the fact that a maniac can become President and threaten to do these crazy things makes bond traders more skeptical of the country's ability to pay its debts without default or inflating it away.
Realistically, the people still have way too much to lose. Even if the majority want better, they aren't willing to lose their jobs to protest endlessly. It will get worse before it gets better.
This is it exactly. For some sort of revolution, you need 25-45 year old men in particular to feel pain and a loss of quality of life. Nothing changes until this cohort feels strong negative consequences.
Exactly. A cohort of men did feel pain. Then a candidate called them deplorable. So they voted for the candidate who showed up in places like rural Wisconsin that the other csndidate found deplorable.
Nobel winner Paul Krugman:
>I think maybe the thing I'm least proud of is that I missed one of the important problems of globalization. I thought it was on the whole a good thing, but that it would be problematic.
>But what I missed was the way that the impact would be concentrated on particular communities. So we can look and say that the China shock displaced maybe one or two million U.S. manufacturing workers. A million-and-a-half people are laid off every month, so what's that?
>But what I missed was that there would be individual towns that would be in the path of this tidal wave of imports from China that would have their reason for existence gutted. >Economist Paul Krugman on how political attitudes changed with U.S. economic shifts | PBS News https://share.google/Rur85fvkdlxU7MaHX
Yep, but the local pool for deplorables had closed a couple decades, so they went to pools at polite country clubs.
I don't like it, but the revolution already started. Will it turn into a civil war, or will people dial back the rhetoric? If reddit comments are indicator...
We also have a culture of individualism and narcissism. As a society, we don't have any fucking idea of how to work together. And the institutions that have been set up to organize people are usually overrun with sociopaths at the top, and working more like MLM fundraising organizations and not addressing the problems they were set up to solve.
Yup. Our failure as a society is that we never actually learned to treat each other as valuable parts of that society. Too much “mUh RuGgEd iNdiViDUaLiSm” and not enough, “hey, brother, are you okay?”
Are we allowed to terminate the current republic and create a second one? France is on their what, FIFTH one already? They started their first one shortly after the United States constitution was ratified. Thats five entire republics since we started our first one. They at least were able to say "hey guys this really isnt fucking working, we need to start over" and admit that their previous constitutions had some serious problems that needed to be fixed. We are too hardheaded to admit this so we force ourselves to suffer.
Realistically, if Americans begin an armed revolt or general strike, which are the only actual options before elections occur, it will be even worse for the bond markets than the current insanity.
I reckon plenty of people are doing what they can short of civil war, which would have a very uncertain outcome and kill huge numbers of people. There are more desirable outcomes that take a bit longer.
Right now fascism is hitting individual cities. Reach out to your local community right now and start organizing. ICE/CBP is the paramilitary. I’m planting a garden, getting firearms and ammo , and stockpiling food and supplies. If you want there are CPR and Stop the Bleed classes that are offered through the community. You can also take FEMA training through your county. Learn your civil rights. If you care about immigrants you can apply as a volunteer through Interfaith Welcome Coalition. Get involved in your local political scene. Gas masks if you’re going to protest, medic supplies , good tourniquet etc , shatter free goggles etc . Good luck to you
We elected Trump president again and gave his Republican sychophants the house and Senate when they already had the supreme court. You really think we are smart enough to protestt effectively?
They are. Huge protests on freezing weather. Protestors are out here being arrested and killed in broad daylight to stand up to this and you the brave little keyboard warrior ride in smugly on your high horse. Pathetic
Protesting in a blue/purple state accomplishes what, exactly? I’m old enough to remember OH, FL, etc. being battlegrounds. What happened? Is more concentration and more navel gazing in deep blue states going to change any of this? THINK!!
Let’s start by getting rid of Chuck Schumer (and everyone else from NY) from leadership. The strategy of betting it all on college-educated white collar city dwellers is completely bankrupt.
People are literally dying standing up to fascist secret police attacking minorities in the street and you call THAT navel gazing while you hand ring about electoral politics the. I was right to call you pathetic
Its not because the will of the people is actively sabotaged and subverted by nefarious actors.
Even after the civil war, white Americans cannot help but get drunk off the lie of White Supremacy.
White supremacy always get in the way of America doing the right thing and has never and will never be eradicated because white people cling to it, and any white person in the world can immigrate here and join the drunken hate
brainwashed, disenfranchised. honestly unless youre the type to look for it i can see how someone would miss it. theyre boiling the frogs from room temp
They’re too busy protecting illegal immigrants, rioting in churches, and trying to run over federal agents. All stuff that doesnt make much of a difference to the rest of the world.
It's a reflection of who has a voice in the US. Citizen United made cash equal a voice, and the head dog of DOGE alone has roughly two thirds of a trillion voices.
This always bothers me. Each one the 50 states is the size and population of an entire country in Europe. That makes it incredibly difficult to simply protest your way to change. You can’t shut down the whole country like you could in France or Italy with a few tens of thousands of people. Tens of thousands of people are turning out in Minnesota and did shut the biggest city down for a day.
Now, I’m 4000km away from that state… it literally is a foreign land and if it weren’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have even known there were protests occurring today.
Even if everyone rioted, this isn’t a system where snap elections are built in to the process. The line of succession is well defined, so after Trump is Vance (arguably worse in many ways) and beyond that is Johnson (lawful evil at best?). Republicans in general and the Trump admin specifically have functionally unchecked political power until January 1st next year assuming dems win the midterms.
The only alternative right now is really violent overthrow, and I don’t think anyone is willing to go that far just yet.
the people are... it's the democratic leadership that is failing to fight. they are owned by the same donors as the republicans... they are paid losers. so, yes, the people are fighting fascism, when our "leaders" are just fine with it. it's a fucking uphill battle, with no help from government.
Right, like debt is a long run issue, but deficits are balanced against demand for US debt. And the acute problem here is the rupturing of the global order as the Canadian PM called it that is affecting demand for US debt that has supported deficits, its a far bigger risk than just the amount of the national debt.
You sell bonds. That means someone else buys bonds.
If other nations are desperate to sell their US government debt and lower the price, someone will buy it. Either private US institutions or the US Fed. Not only that, a lot US government debt in Europe is held by private institutions who aren’t going to shoot themselves in the foot over Greenland, Canada, or anything.
The US has a lot more capital than Europe. The economy is huge, this is not Zimbabwe we’re talking about. Their markets have deep pockets. Europe sells, they will buy.
Meanwhile European banks would lose a lot of money over this, and crush their export market to the US because they won’t be able to swap t-bills into USD, which ultimately is going to hurt them more.
Decoupling from the US is a 20-30 year process, and will require serious long term commitment from both public AND private sectors, along with a lot of self sacrifice that humans just don’t have the will to do, despite how angry everyone is now.
I’m not American, hate what they’re doing, etc, but this power fantasy of a US government debt collapse due to a tiny fraction of European governments offloading a tiny fraction of debt is just that, a fantasy.
I think if you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot, gently offloading bonds seems like a wise plan. The risk part of the equation has dramatically shot up and so the value of these bonds has decreased, and by the looks of it will continue to decrease. And every party is seeing this happen at the same time, which also reduces demand. You don't want to be the bagholder
With the risk up, you're probably better off with some other risky bets. Perhaps a basket of bonds from various places rather than such a heavy reliance on US bonds only?
OKAY. Lets TAX the Bootlicking Billionaires that put the Mfer in Power. How about a.PATRIOT TAX on BILLIONAIRES of say 90%? Restructue Tax Brackets DOUBLE for Ultra Millionaires and NEPO Babies. And no dumping stocks to pay for it w o major penalty.. musk did 100+ Million to Trump. He's benefitted 10 fold.. we're out in the cold
Right, AFAIK there was never any issue with the economics of treasury bonds. The issue is that Europeans don’t want to financially support a country that is threatening to go to war with them.
I’m sure the Europeans would love not to have to upend their pension programs because 50.3% of American voters liked the fascist in 2024, but what can you do. I also didn’t want the damn Stazi 2.0 to terrorize Minnesota either, but hey, 50.3% of voters… (still pissed)
Didn't see anything in the article that mentioned raising taxes, and rich conservative talking about balancing the budget just means further cutting programs like Social Security or taking them private so ticks like this guy can have something else to feed on.
The article is wrong then. You can clearly see the K shaped economy starts at Reagan. It his shitty trickle down theory (renamed supply side economics) has shit all over the foundation of America's economy since day 1. His single act of throwing out the 12 year running IBM Antitrust suit, a case that cost IBM the equivalent of the entire budget of the DOJ each year. Reagan set the precedent for corporate consolidation and in that time we have seen the number publicly traded companies be cut in HALF.
As Penn Wharton Budget Model Director Kent Smetters recently told Fortune, “What people don’t realize is just how progressive the United States income tax system is,” by far the most progressive in the OECD. With such a progressive tax system, he added, “it’s really hard to raise a lot of revenue,” because the wealthy are paying such a disproportionate share.
They are conflating wealthy professionals with ultra wealthy. The folks paying a huge share are the hot shot surgeons or programmers who earn $1M a year in salary. The ultra wealthy basically have no income, their money is held in investments and they take out loans against those to live off and thus pay nothing in income taxes.
This. Long term capital gains is just 15%. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than even those in the 22% marginal bracket ($48,476 to $103,350). And especially those paying up to 37%.
"Debbie [my secretary] works just as hard as I do and she pays twice the rate I pay. I think that's outrageous." --Warren Buffett, 2012
"There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." --also Warren Buffett, 2006
Does Warren Buffett actually do anything for the common people, or does he just chirp about it? Has he done something like Mark Cuban has with his pharmacy business?
I don’t think he’s done a ton. He signed that giving pledge for when he dies, and I’m sure he contributes to charities, but he’s not funding super progressive politicians in an effort to make for a more equitable society.
Not particularly, especially after coasting for decades on the good PR of giving away his fortune only to renege at the last minute and award control to his kids.
And he forced the 2022 strike at one of Berkshire's subsidiaries, BNSF, the largest railway the US, over the union demanding a single day of paid sick leave. Then successfully sued to block the strike in court.
But I'd argue his quotes are still relevant. It gives perspective from their side that they know the game is rigged.
this make sense - we want to disincentivize work, so we tax it heavily. idleness, on the other hand, is a virtue, so we make sure the lazy rich get largely tax-free treatment. hopefully people get the message and stop working.
That's because loans aren't income. And loans aren't free; they pay interest on the loans. The fundamental issue with trying to tax these types of assets is that coming up with a valuation that isn't based on realization (i.e. the actual sale price of an asset when it's sold) is that it's all conjecture. The other problem is that any rule for taxing an asset class is that the rule has to apply to all owners of that asset class, which hurts the 80th to 99th percentile of wealth holders way more than the top 1% because they are typically less liquid and have to liquidate more to cover their taxes. There needs to be more to a tax proposal than mere envy and a selective analysis of facts.
The article and OP are either intentionally misleading, or the article is poorly written and they are interpreting it wrong. The 70% figure is the top quintile, when all income/wealth figures are about the top 1% of income (which includes income from realized capital gains).
The share of income going to the top 1% doubled between 1979 and 2022, while the tax burden of the whole top 20% of earners increased by only 27%.
So while the income of the top 1% doubled, their tax burden does not appear to have grown as much.
> So while the income of the top 1% doubled, their tax burden does not appear to have grown as much
That doesn't seem like an accurate analysis of the rest of your comment. If their income increased, so did their tax burden. The tax rate doesn't have to increase for them to pay more. If their income doubles, then their taxes should roughly double as well (arguably, more, since the increased income would be at their marginal tax rate)
Yes and that's only logical. Moreover, the ultra wealthy pay FAR less in percentage of their income than upper middle class folks do (making like $250k/yr, let's say).
The ultra wealthy live off of debt. It's called "Buy, Borrow, Die" accounting and it's how Bezos gets paid $80k/yr but is able to live off his equities without cashing them in.
Ultra wealthy typically pay around 10-12% in taxes. Their main source of income is long term capital gains (15%) and then they're able to lower it from there with dedications, loop holes, carry forwards, etc.
The America working class would riot if they paid the taxes of the European working class. The European taxation system on whole is much more regressive than the U.S. system, considering an average 20% VAT rate in Europe.
Can't meaningfully solve the problem by cutting social security, not unless you keep the social security specific tax, but stop paying it out. Anything that officially ends social security will end the tax along with it, unless they want riots in the streets.
They can cut military spending. Or raise taxes. Or do massive program cuts across the board, entirely reshaping the country.
Also important to note, that like social security, all government spending actually buys things. Medicare/Medicaid spending ends up as revenue for healthcare professionals and manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Infrastructure spending ultimately pays wages to workers and buys the materials they use, which is revenue to companies.
Cutting govt spending pulls money out of the economy. Cutting govt spending enough to start reducing the debt would be to induce an economic depression.
Not that we couldn’t cut some spending (like DHS and ICE, for example), but the answer is and always has been revenue, they just don’t want that to be the answer.
I was having this argument somewhere leading up to the election, when all the talk was about Musk and what would become DOGE. The guy I was arguing with was saying that government spending was essentially a closed loop - cutting spending wouldn't impact the economy because that money "wasn't doing anything productive anyway".
I asked him how the government could spend money such that it was, you know, spent, and represented an actual cost to the American taxpayer, but that it didn't go anywhere or do anything.
Yes, even zeroing out discretionary spending, which would be a disaster, would not eliminate the annual deficit.
But what do you mean by entitlement reform? Do you think we should spend less on social security? Medicare? Veterans benefits? Veterans and seniors are already struggling.
Medicare is the only place where I can even think of savings and those savings come from negotiating better prices for things Medicare already buys, not cutting benefits or increasing cost sharing.
And why would tax increases not be part of the solution? And raising minimum wages and implementing other steps to reduce income inequality would also increase tax revenue without even changing the rates.
> not unless you keep the social security specific tax, but stop paying it out
You raise the retirement age and/or you cut/reform the spousal/widow benefit. This would have to also be coupled with an increase in taxes on the upper middle class and the wealthy. And a decrease in military spending.
We have an aging population, the idea that we aren't going to be working longer is fantastical
Don’t tax the upper middle class more… our middle class is eroding. Our wealth distribution is a hockey stick, tax the wealthy more. We need more tax brackets and our tax brackets need to actually scale to reach the rich and ultra rich.
It is eroding into a bifurcated upper middle class and lower middle class. You have to tax the upper middle along with the wealthy. Taxing just the wealthy won't be enough
Sustainable taxation and redistribution always focuses on middle class taxes. Europe has much higher taxes on the middle class because they have already taxed their super wealthy and corporations into capital flight.
It's pretty easy to understand: the people that would have to pay more in taxes don't want to, and they have the money necessary to convince the politicians to not do it.
Program cuts is not enough. It has to be much higher taxes for the super rich and corporations and much lower defense budget. I guess a value added tax excluding food and other basics is an option and it's hard to evade. Medicare for all will also save a lot of money making higher taxes less painful.
ironically, the USA dipping out of the world order scene would justify the military budget being slashed (we no longer want to fight China in the Pacific/Russia in Europe). But thats not going to happen, because shareholders.
But for a brief moment back in 2024, I think thats what a lot of people on the left were kind of hoping for.
Sure, we'd lose favoritism in the EU and Japan/SK, but imagine an extra 500 billion actually going into social safety nets and other things like it.
It might even still happen (very much doubt it though). The USA does not need a bloated military budget if we are just going to focus on the Monroe Doctrine. But again, the shareholders...
Also, the fact Trump talks about the Golden Dome is proof to me that this is in no way the actual plan
You might be surprised on the military budget. The most vital(and expensive) thing the US needs to do for national security is increase our shipbuilding capability. A strong navy is needed even if a more isolationist foreign policy is adopted, and we won't be able to lean on our allies if we do go that more isolationist route.
Americans won’t riot in the streets and the few that do will be shot with less lethal ammo and tear gassed. What would happen would just be a sharper decline in life expectancy, which we are arguably already in since the botched COVID response and “recovery.”
The best analogue I would point to would be post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s where all the jobs and pensions were sold away and old people died of drugs, alcohol, exposure, illness, or a combination thereof.
You'd get Republicans rioting if they ended social security but kept making us pay the tax for it. It wouldn't be social security getting them out there, it would be the tax.
Bring back the draft. Paying a minor stipend to cover essentials, and housing troops in the wood frame, open bay barracks that sufficed well into the 1980’s would save a fortune. Keep these young men single for at least their first two enlistment periods. The current situation with half of all members being married and eligible for base housing consumes ~50% of present DoD spending. Dependent healthcare is a major portion of that. Then impose a moratorium on all new weapons and systems procurement for at least a decade. If the B-52, with updates, can last 75 years, a tank can go 20 and a ship 50. Given Trump’s standing with our (former) allies, phase out all overseas Army and Air Force bases. Create a drawdown with a RIF to right size the force. The savings will be huge.
>Then impose a moratorium on all new weapons and systems procurement for at least a decade.
Insanity. You really think we'll even have a military R&D capability after putting it on pause for a decade?
>If the B-52, with updates, can last 75 years, a tank can go 20 and a ship 50.
The Abrams is 46 years old at this point. Individual ships can go 50 years(depending on how beat up they get by just traveling around on the water), but ships take so long to design and build they are often behind the tech curve by the time they hit the water.
If anything the US military needs to cut down on active forces and spend MORE money on procurement. Design stuff that isn't from the cold war, and build them in numbers. Store it all in the desert to enable an easier military expansion if that is ever needed
Tbh the Abrams tank that rolled off the manufacturing line decades ago is not the same as the one today. I would argue that at some point you got a new (or multiple new) tank that shares some design similarities but is fundamentally different. I'd argue that it changed more than than the T-72 to T-90.
I noted a RIF was appropriate. Procurement needs to be restructured from top to bottom. Defense contractors need to be restricted from sourcing parts from every congressional district in the country to ensure their systems are purchased.
>Procurement needs to be restructured from top to bottom.
Mostly agreed. If the B-21 is anything to go by, the Air Force seems to have figured out procurement. The Army and Navy though.....
>Defense contractors need to be restricted from sourcing parts from every congressional district in the country to ensure their systems are purchased.
The people passing that law would be the same people who want that to happen though. Unfortunatly not realistic. It would certainly be more efficient to have military industrial hubs for the talent to congregate around.
it’s interesting because normally conservatives don’t care about the deficit during republican administrations and them never shut the fuck up about it when a democrats in charge
It’s the damndest thing, conservative politicians always say they want to reduce the deficit but spending tends to increase while they’re in charge and then they cut taxes to revenues are down as well.
And well I’ll be, the tax cuts for your average Joe often seem set to expire in a couple years meanwhile the tax cuts for huge corporations stay forever.
The fact that it’s so controversial to tax the rich more but the first richest man has double the paper wealth of the next richest dude is insane. Not to mention they’d never miss the money a lot of people would kill to have just to have a slightly better life.
There is no reason to cut SS. Literally does nothing for the deficit, besides the fact that SS holds a chunk of the debt.
The largest US debt holders in the world are the Government and the Fed reserve, with largest foreign holder as Japan with only 2.6 % of holdings.
When Trump cuts he is just giving to himself and his friends.
Social security financing is moving towards a point where its taxes won't be able to fund benefits. At that point, the law is a bit unclear, but the most common interpretation is that benefits will have to be cut under current law. It is either that, or the law will have to be changed - cut benefits, raise taxes, change retirement age, authorize using borrowed funds from the general fund to pay for benefits, etc. So one way or another something will have to change with trust fund depletion, and if it's borrowing money from the general fund then that has implications for the national debt and interest rates.
Estimates vary, but removing the taxable maximum fixes anywhere from 50-70% of the funding shortfall. The estimate is sensitive to assumptions related to wage growth and labor supply elasticities with respect to taxation, as well as demographics like immigration and fertility rates. But I haven't seen an estimate where that is the only change made and the funding shortfall is totally covered.
So benefits would still need to be cut if removing the taxable maximum is the only change.
This is yet another symptom of the wealthy and corporations shifting their tax burden onto the rest of society who increasingly don't have the funds to cover their own survival.
I mean SS is funded by FICA payroll taxes (which corporations are obligated to contribute to) so I think I disagree.
If we need to raise them then let’s do it. My broader point was that SS is absolutely on a path to being suddenly underfunded which will cause an immediate cut to benefits.
> I'd rather be gambling the money they take from my check each week in the open market. I could already be retired...
Sure, or you could lose it/spend it all and then have nothing in retirement and then taking care of you would still be society's problem. Which is one of the main reasons why Social Security exists.
Inflation was 2.7% YOY which falls into target numbers.
Inflation from 2020-2024 was an average of 9% which means that something that costed $100 in 2020 costed $141.16 in 2024
That same item that costed $141.16 at the beginning of this year now costs $144.97
If you don’t like your job, change it. You’re free to do what you want in America. Stealing from others to benefit yourself doesn’t make sense in this country.
Idk man I can’t get behind that shit how many industry billionaires are only on top because they got ahead of regulation and pulled the ladder up behind them or paid lawmakers to make regulation super hard?
Screw everyone else is right. So why can’t you repair your own devices you buy and why are labor laws and tax laws growing more regressive.
Yeah because your life went perfect everyone else should eat shit.
I’m not enabling the American people but multiple things can be true at once but let me ask you. We can both agree there are more less fortunate then rich and not everyone can be rich right?
We also have a duty to make sure things are fair and stable as well. Like you think if things continue to go to shit if people see your address they’re gonna say well calihusker is diffeerent. No judging by that attitude you’d be counted along with them in they’re zip code
It's unfortunate, trump caused that 9% inflation. It's getting back under controll-ish and he's trying to do it again. Massive stimulus and trying to force rates to 1%
Seriously, roll back all the tax cuts from the last 40 years. What else are we going to do, cut taxes all the way down to 0 to drive GDP up? Then what? I'd rather roll back all the tax cuts we didn't need and balance the budget and make sure everything is properly funded so we can destress America. Anyone who thinks we can't do that and still retain our capitalist nature and economic exceptionalism must hate America.
It's so fucking ridiculous. The last time we had a balanced budget was Clinton. What else did we have? Higher taxes on the wealthy. Now the idea of reversing the Bush tax cuts is anathema but cutting social security is on the table...
I don't have the numbers, but considering how much we spend on the military and them wanted to dump MORE money into them/ICE I'd hazard to guess even if we cut ALL social programs we'd still not break even.
The unpopular answer is that we'll need to increase tax rates on everyone and cut spending at the same time. It'll be extraordinarily painful, but past and current generations have been selling out the future for lower tax rates and excessive spending too long.
The 1% take a massively disproportionate portion of the growth and productivity every year. A massively disproportionate tax rate on them is warranted.
> > massively disproportionate tax rate on [the 1%] is warranted
>
> I don’t understand why this is even remotely controversial
I don't think it is controversial, it is the current system. The top 1% pay 43% of all taxes (that's disproportionate). The top 10% pay 73% of all taxes.
I also think a progressive tax (like we have) is the only system anybody has ever figured out how to fund our society (or literally any society). I'm saying all economists agree on this, I agree with it. The wealthy MUST pay more than the less fortunate.
Now, the fact remains that we still have this deficit, and the sooner we address it the EASIER it is to address. I wish everybody would stop looking for an easy answer and do "a little of everything". Meaning we need to raise taxes on the 1% a little more, we need to raise taxes on the top 10% a little more, we need to cut military spending a little bit, we need to raise the minimum age to draw Social Security by a year or two, we need to remove the cap on Social Security contributions (but not raise benefits to anybody, that's going the wrong direction), etc.
I'll toss in one more controversial idea as follows: one of the reasons this pyramid scheme is starting to falter is formerly we always had a growing population where more and more younger people would enter the workforce and pay taxes while the older people died off. People are living a long time (drawing Social Security, and spending Medicare funds to stay alive) and our population is shrinking without immigration. So I would strategically open up a few more legal immigration spots to younger immigrants that can pay lots of taxes for a long time (their entire working careers). This isn't "fair" where immigration is a pure lottery, and it doesn't solve the humanitarian crisis of a ton of starving poor people in other countries. It's a selfish thing we can do to possibly increase the tax base and keep the pyramid scheme going for another few years. These budget deficit problems are serious, if allowing a few more higher paid immigrants into the country helps that financial situation it should at least be considered.
Or we could just create a public option Health plan, so that Americans pay less for equivalent healthcare just like the rest of the developing world.
The Military budget is also way more of an issue than entitlements. We pay more for our Military than the next ten biggest armies in the world, and most of those countries are members of NATO. There’s way more money to cut out of defense spending than social programs.
>Or we could just create a public option Health plan, so that Americans pay less for equivalent healthcare just like the rest of the developing world.
We can and should do this, it would save us money AND improve outcomes/access to huge swathes of the population. For profit healthcare insurance is a giant money wasting scam.
>The Military budget is also way more of an issue than entitlements
Absolutely not. In 2024 entitlements (mostly social security, medicare, and medicaid) made up $4.1T of the $6.8T in total government spending, compared with $883b in defense spending.
>We pay more for our Military than the next ten biggest armies in the world, and most of those countries are members of NATO.
That's mostly because our COL is so much higher. When adjusted for PPP Chinese spending totals ~$500b and Russia ~$400b. And even that isnt a really fair apples to apples comparison as a solid portion or our spending goes to troop salaries and benefits compared with China which is rapidly improving the quality and quantity of their equipment, quickly closing the gap with the US military.
That being said, we should be tackling corruption, fraud, and waste in our military spending to improve the outcomes from our high spending levels, not trying to cut it. We're already falling behind China in the global arms race on a number of fronts.
that's just patently false. i'm no fan of it, but the military budget is completely dwarfed by social security and medicare. we need to means test SSI and raise the cap on the tax.
I'm not sure that anything in that comment was false. We would pay less if we added a single payer health care option (if you want more insurance feel free to purchase it), our military budget is as big as the next 10 countries COMBINED, 6 of those countries are allies.
Means testing SSI is just a way to increase bureaucracy which always benefits the rich since they can pay someone else to deal with it. If we're going to add operating overhead (like what it would take to implement means testing) let's start with an office that tracks the effects of spending bills and then reports on the outcomes (vs expectations). After that we could do a public audit of military spending. There are many better ideas than means testing SSI.
That’s an incomplete comparison. Social Security and Medicare have substantial self-funding to work off of. The military does not. And no reasonable person can argue that military spending is carefully managed. Hell, DoD has never passed an audit. And they’ve know they were coming.
There's tons of waste and fraud in the entitlements programs that could and should be cut, but we also need to raise taxes (instead of constantly cutting them), and we need to make meaningful reforms to the social safety net.
It'll never not be insane to me how little negotiating power Medicare/Medicaid have considering how many people are enrolled in those programs. In sane countries, they allow the government to negotiate prices on services and drugs by threatening providers that they will be cut off from a huge chunk of the marketplace without playing ball.
Entitlements are generally separate from the budget, and are directly paid for. You pay into Social Security, you get Social Security. That's what an entitlement is. It's something you paid for, like having the title to your car.
Certain politicians just like using the word because people confuse it with a sense of entitlement.
Social Security was added as an item on the federal budget by LBJ to make the costs of the Vietnam War appear as a smaller share of US spending. It is divided separately and so should have separate accounting.
“Pay into” is cap. It’s far more like insurance than it is something you “pay into.” Fact is the current workers are paying for the current beneficiaries of social security. What happens when people live even longer but the population of workers decreases?
People are collecting more than what they paid in taxes. We have also expanded benefits like Medicare part d without increasing taxes to paid for them.
I really don't care. I don't care any more about the <1% than they care about the rest of us as anything other than fodder or schools of fish to be skimmed out of an infinite ocean. And I have heard both analogies from people of means in unguarded moments.
In the history of the known world, we have never been rid of this paradigm. I am well past done believing there will ever be altruistic people in power. Instead we will have these disgusting "alpha" humans constantly throwing us at each other while they wait for the spoils to manifest, constantly pushing the envelope to normalize the freakishness of their positions amongst the other animals.
They are ticks. A fanciful view of it would be the aliens from the movie "Dark City." They are not symbiotes. They are bloated parasites, unfortunately endemic to our species.
In the history of the world people also didn’t live this long and expect this much. Just a hundred years ago people would be dropping dead at 50-60 and they wouldn’t expect even a fraction of the quality of life as they do today. So comparing how things were like before is effectively worthless.
Says the man who made his fortune in Chicago and left for lower taxes in Florida in retirement. Sir, you are the problem.
Markets aren’t dumb. When there’s unpredictability and a horrible budget deficit that gets worse every election cycle, smart money isn’t going to be chasing the US.
He didn't just run away after he got his, he actively worked to destroy any attempts Illinois did to balance the budget that would mean increasing taxes on people like him.
Same guy who helped rig the DTCC during the Gamestop fiasco to force brokers to stop allowing buys so he could salvage his billions in shorts at Melvin Capital. Dude's a financial terrorist. Fuck Ken Griffin.
You pay federal taxes no matter what state you live in. He’s not a monster for moving states to pay lower state taxes.
Edit: because I’m being downvoted for keeping us on point - this entire thread is about the federal governments debt. You all can hate Ken Griffin with a passion, my comment won’t change that or attempt to alter your perception. I don’t care for the man. The state tax issue you all are harping on has nothing to do with the federal deficit/debt and federal taxes.
No, he’s a monster for using his considerable wealth to campaign against Illinois changing to a progressive income tax…then fleeing the state afterwards.
Florida has no state taxes. That’s the entire point here. He moved specifically for that reason. Made a fortune in Chicago, then left before he paid his dues.
And he took his entire company and all its employees with him. So no, it’s not just about one person choosing which state to retire in.
You guys are either woefully uninformed or weirdly trying to downplay this to defend a billionaire.
Right! I'm not sure what kind of point they were making. Like, does this person believe we shouldn't be able to move between states? That's like the whole damn point of the US, you are free to travel or live in any state of the country. Even within states, local taxes vary, so would someone moving, in the same state, to a locality with lower taxes, be a monster? If so, I guess I am a monster for moving one city over, where the local taxes are cheaper.
It is the ultimate political "Tragedy of the Commons." Voters punish anyone who suggests raising taxes or cutting benefits, so politicians are essentially incentivized to keep the party going until the music stops. Ken Griffin is right about the warning, but he’s talking to a room full of people who get fired if they actually listen to him. We keep waiting for a "painless" solution that simply doesn't exist in math or reality.
> Voters punish anyone who suggests raising taxes or cutting benefits
This is a blatant lie. Just tell the voters you are going to raise taxes and cut benefits for minorities and those hogs start slapping their meaty mitts together like trained seals. That is the entire republican platform.
pretty sure being a billionaire is a conscious choice, not something you’re born with. they could stop being “minorities” any time they want with some hefty donations to charities, or, oh I dunno, paying their taxes
So many of these politicians are independently wealthy and could easily transition back to the private sector. They don’t need to worry about being fired
The reason it isn't being mined much already is because its a frozen hell hole, far from the rest of the world, that has nearly no infrastructure at all, and is bathed in darkness 3 months out of the year. The average thickness of the Greenland ice cap is 1 mile deep ffs.
It's not being mined because it's not profitable to mine it, not because Greenland/Denmark are keeping the US out (they also aren't mining it).
Along with many problems of the "Tragedy of the Commons", it's the work of a right-wing conservative nutjob. It's more ahistoric than claims of barter being the norm prior to currency.
This is a financier's read on the situation. A historian would argue that we're watching dedollarization.
Rising yields aren't generating demand for government debt like they have in the past. The virtuous cycle is over. Even getting the national debt under control might not necessarily mean that demand for American or Japanese government bonds will meaningfully recover.
Reducing the debt would be nice, but we have countries to antagonize and there are lots of elderly naturalized citizens who haven't been drug into the cold in their underwear and had their face ground into the concrete.
Call me ignorant, but I just can't understand why we cant balance the budget, ever? Why are both sides in agreement that racking up trillions in new debt is better than just spending within our means?
I know most redditors will simply say that politicians are idiots, but there has to be some kind of ideology behind this. Is there some super secret way we are going to get out of paying our debts?
What are we even spending all of the extra money on?
IT feels like medicare,/ medicaid/ and veterans benefits all need to be reorganized. We need a socialized system, that can negotiate prices, and cut out all the pencil pushers and insurance companies that are leeches.
We also need a shakeup in the defense industry. Too many weapons systems come in over budget by a long shot.
Everyone is just content at bleeding the country dry.
Why is because every dollar of spending has a constituency and nobody wants to pay taxes. It's not hard to understand at all.
You want to cut spending? Great. Cut what? Healthcare, education, pensions, research, law enforcement, national security, veterans? Even if some of those are appealing to you, there's a lot of people who strongly disagree. You want to raise taxes? Whose taxes and why should they accept that? Given that neither party has had a filibuster-proof majority, they have to thread this needle and do it in a bipartisan way.
And compound that with the fact that Republicans are genuinely full of shit on fiscal matters. They have long clung to the provably false notion that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating growth. That being said, it's at least partly true that any reduction in government spending or increase in taxes will slow growth.
Modern monetary theory holds that as long as the economy is growing faster than the debt is expanding you can spend at a deficit forever and achieve more growth than you would balancing the budget.
Debt as a percentage of GDP has been almost monotonically increasing for fifty years … so whether MMT says this or whether this is right, the economy has not generally been growing faster than the debt (currently debt is growing about twice as fast as GDP - 2ish % GDP growth vs 5ish % debt growth).
This part is true - arguably even without MMT - I think simply because debt servicing is in the federal spending. So you can run a budget deficit but if you are incurring new debt slower than you are retiring old debt, the total debt could go down.
Yes. When inflation and growth are both low even moderate deficits will increase the debt. When inflation is higher and growth more robust like in the last 5 years the debt will go down, even in the face of high deficits
Modern monetary theory isn't a theory, it's a wish and prayer. It works until it suddenly doesn't.
It also assumes that growth can go on forever, which it absolutely cannot.
We are yeast, and fossil fuels are sugar. Pretty soon we're going to run out of resources and turn our environment into alcohol, and that only happens faster with faster growth.
We are spending the same (or more) and reducing taxes/revenue. Despite what Republicans think, there is a bottom to tax cuts. This is like working less and charging more on your credit card. It's not great fiscal policy, but they still get automatically bumped in polling on handling the economy.
So, you have to increase taxes on top earners and likely cut some fat. You don't have to cut entitlements like most are saying. We can afford those if we practice better fiscal policy.
No, we do need to cut entitlements. The last time there was a surplus, spending was around 17.5% of GDP. Now spending is 23% of GDP. Care to guess the last time revenue was 23% of GDP? How about 20% of GDP?
Pro-tip: You can cut every dollar of discretionary spending.....every cent of defense, every cent of WIC, every dollar to the FBI / CIA / ICE, all foreign aid etc....and you'd still have a 500+ billion dollar annual deficit.
We're way past the "cut entitlements" simpleton approach.
Yah we gotta tax and cut the loopholes for ultra high net worth earners. Also if we had single payer it would save the average Joe more than the potential tax increase and as long as we (congress) doesn’t purposely design it to fail (think original healthcare bill vs what passed under Obama) then the care would be better as well.
Most in dollar amounts not in percentages. Most billionaires are living off of loans to avoid taxes. I'd wager most high earners (top 10%) aren't paying over 20% (if that on all income).
And taxes are a fraction of what they were in the 70’s? I really have a hard time believing someone could be this wrong, in the r/Economics sub. How did you become so misinformed?
In 1979, the average rate for the top one percent was 22.6%. In 2020 it was 23.3%. Is that a fraction of what it was?
Yep. With all those cuts to revenue it has been that way for about a decade now.
This chart is a little out of date because it's from 2024 and the annual interest on the debt got up to about a trillion in 2025, but it's illustrative.
Your statement proves the point that so-called “mandatory” entitlements are driving spending increases, and to reduce the deficit, these programs need cuts.
You know what's driving this? Three tax cuts over the last 10 years that we couldn't afford. Frozen SS / Medicare tax rates (and a cap on the SS side).
You're a one trick pony that has tried nothing and is all out of ideas.
Except your tax cut claim is false. 2022 was the fifth highest revenue since WWII. And you can’t “afford” tax cuts, because tax cuts aren’t spending.
As for SS, you do realize there is a cap because benefits are capped, right? Eliminating the cap doesn’t even fix SS.
Am I a one trick pony? Maybe. But my trick hasn’t been tried in a long time. But the last time it was tried, it resulted in a budget surplus, not a deficit.
My ideas involve respecting the rights of people. Coming those rights is the right to keep your own money.
And? 2022 was an outlier year for tax collections based on disruptions and delayed consumption from the Covid years. You're seriously suggesting that one data point justifies additional tax cuts?
That's absurd.
Eliminating the SS wage cap removes about 75 percent of the financial shortage. Means testing new beneficiaries up to 400 percent federal poverty level removes the rest with a surplus.
Your trick is austerity. Austerity brings recessions, it does not ensure prosperity.
>My ideas involve respecting the rights of people. Coming those rights is the right to keep your own money.
Yes yes, we were all neck beard Libertarians in college. Then we got responsibilities and grew out of it.
And every single year revenue exceeded 18% of GDP was an outlier. Spending should be 17-17.5% of GDP, the long term revenue average.
Your ideas for SS fundamentally change SS from an earned benefit to just another welfare program, and one people would rather opt out of if given the option.
Believing people have rights is a “neck-beard Libertarian” idea? The belief in government protecting the rights of people is the very foundation of liberal democracy.
The policy of deep cuts with no revenue increases that you keep going on about here and now are an austerity position. You're being intentionally obtuse here.
Making the changes I propose keeps SS tied to its roots as a paid for wage program. Means testing is also a throwback to the original, difference being back then it was means tested with a higher retirement age to collect instead. Same principal at work.
What I've suggest is also more practical than the handful of nothing you've proposed thus far. Oh I'm sorry, you said to cut old people's benefits. And you wonder I say you're espousing neckbeard Libertarian ideas lol.
Entitlements are a blip. They need reform but is a tiny speck. Defense spending and corp taxes are the biggest opportunities to make meaningful impacts.
SS, Medicare and interest on debt are all bigger outlays than defense. Defense can, and should be cut. But to pretend nothing else should be cut is burying your head in the sand.
Corporate taxes are a cost. Same as a tariff. Consumers pay them.
Unless they are coupled with penalties to prevent costs being passed to the consumer. The wealth to fix this needs to come from corporations first, the 1% second, and then a gradient of the top 20% thereafter. Not eating from the plates of those already getting the short end of the inequality stick.
Also, you want to shift even more of a burden on the very people who already bear the largest burden. How about we make the tax burden more equitable? Equitability is the goal now. Let’s do that.
Revenue is remarkably stable over time. If spending had stayed at the levels it was at in 2000(17.5% of GDP), there would have been a surplus as recently as 2022. However, I would be willing to revert to the 2000 tax rates if spending goes back to that level as well.
Precisely, we'd have a balanced budget and sustainable spending. Going back almost 50 years the U.S. has never cut spending in proportion to tax cuts. Given this history it is not a reasonable ask or expectation now.
Meanwhile the population of the U.S. has grown by sixty million people from 2000 to 2025. The country has grown and required outlays have grown with it.
Austerity by itself doesn't work. And will not work. Especially if the U.S. is to continue being the reserve currency. In order to balance the budget there simply must be tax increases of some sort.
Not really. Second highest spending category is interest. Increase revenue without increasing spending and treasuries should be considered as safer asset.
So increased revenue could lower spending without cutting entitlements.
>So increased revenue could lower spending without cutting entitlements.
This statement doesn’t make any sense.
What is the highest spending category? To increase revenue, taxes would need to be increased. On everyone. However, in the past, everyone did pay higher rates, and revenue was comparable to now.
Interest is around 15% of the spending while social security at 22%. It's for FY2026 so since October, but I checked on wayback and in FY2025 it was 14% and 22%.
Why are both sides in agreement that racking up trillions in new debt is better than just spending within our means?
Governments aren't households. They can use debt to manage their economies and there are economic theories that government debt like modern monetary theory is needed to spend currency into existence. Ultimately though, there are two ways governments can spend debt: infrastructure and support to people or tax cuts to the wealthy. And tax cuts without spending reductions IS essentially spending currency into existence and giving it to the wealthy.
The GOP has been fear mongering about the debt for 40 years. One democratic president combined with a GOP congress balanced the budget spending cuts and increased taxes. And the GOP said, no, we didn't mean that way and made tax cuts their primary focus. You'll notice that the GOP complains about spending and debt until they're in power and then it's all about tax cuts first and foremost.
Hillary?! Can you imagine if we had elected someone who had such egregious disrespect for the norms of the presidency and the laws of the country such as to run a private email server?!
You're not crazy, there are a lot of people who do want to balance the budget, they aren't running the country or dictating policy though.
The ideology seems to be we can incur as much debt as we want, nobody is going to call us on it because our debt allows us to strong arm them into never trying.
Clinton had a small budget surplus and the response of Republicans under GW Bush was that if the budget had a surplus then the government is collecting too much tax revenue and taxes should be cut. Forget the fact that we had trillions in debt to still pay back.
Republicans talk a lot of talk but have zero interest in balancing the budget.
Congress always increases the military budget. The military is the largest social program which includes thousands of military contractors. This is incredibly inefficient and wastes billions every year from contractors that over charge and under deliver to billions spend on things we do not need. Medical is our second largest spend however we have a for profit health care system which encourages overcharging. This is supported by an insurance industry whose sole purpose is to profit on medical billing.
If we want to get spending under control we have to admit that vast parts of our society are inefficient and needlessly wasteful. We need to transform these systems into a need based system where the profit motive is outlawed. But we can't do that due to an irrational fear of socialism.
It's not about percentage of GDP. We waste billions every year on crap we don't need or ever use. There are fields of unused airplanes and tanks why? We allow lobbists to tell Congress what to buy for the military and ignore military leaders when they say it's unnecessary. Military spending needs to be vastly cut.
it's absolutely baout percentage of GDP as far as bondholders are concerned, which is the subject of this thread in r/economics, not your personal moral vision for the country.
Even if the hospital is non-profit the drug companies, medical device companies, medical supply companies, food services, insurance, and even ambulance companies are all for profit. We need to completely get rid of the profit motive everywhere in military, healthcare, and education.
And the physicians groups they contract with? How many Americans have been told their hospital is "in network" only to be told the doctor is not and receive extra bills from "out of network" physicians, radiologists, surgeons, compounding pharmacies, etc? The system is designed to be opaque while extracting as much profit as possible from captive patients.
I think it’s the same basic logic as to why households like credit cards. Politically there are strong incentives to both spend money and to cut taxes, whereas there are strong penalties for the opposite. The consequences of these actions have not been felt by any US politician, ever. Until the costs politically are higher than the alternatives, we won’t do anything. I suspect that some semblance of a debt crisis will need to occur for the US to fix its budget issues.
Usually, least everything I have read, democrats do try to take the deficeit. Clinton I believe took it to 0. Not positive but at least out of negatives. Obama also decreased the deficit under bush jr.
As I understand it trump skyrocketed the deficient by cutting taxes and increasing spending.
Biden is a weird one cause he took control during a disaster and his deficient impact was mixed. Partially because he couldn't get the Republicans to cooperate on anything financial.
And trump has one more jumped it and tried to cut taxes more.
So for my entire lifetime, it's been democrats trying to take control over Republican spending and tax cuts. But raising taxes is incredibly unpopular and will likely lose you the next election. Particularly in cases like bidens top bracket tax. The propoganda machine just says "raising taxes" not how it wouldn't impact almost anyone but the top 1%
Republicans have never been the party of fiscal responsibility. Go look at the deficit under every Republican of the last 50 years. Every time they're in office they blow up the debt, then Democrats come in to stabilize it, rinse repeat. Much like the economy, Republicans fuck everything up and Democrats are asked to fix it, then are rewarded by having voters elect another Republican to fuck it all up again.
Trump, GW, Bush, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, the same bullshit cycle after cycle.
We had a balanced budget from 1998-2001, during the Clinton administration. What’s even more shocking is that Republicans controlled Congress during that time.
We could do it again but probably not in this hyper-partisan era.
If you’re a politician there are only two ways to balance the budget
You can call to increase revenue via increasing taxes. You’ll lose massive amounts of donations and have the wealthy push your opponent
You can call to cut services. You’ll piss off the masses but also at this point what’s even left to cut? You’ll also lose any primary to any person claiming they want to restore social services.
The US isn't the only country with debt. To me it feels like at least a partial result of democracy. Campaigning on austerity is a losing strategy, and governments only need a plan for the next election cycle. So while we might all agree that having government debt is bad, having a government actually fix it is kind of political suicide.
Because the incentives for politicians are exactly backwards. Voters reward politicians for doing things that increase the deficit (lowering taxes, increasing social benefits) and punish them for doing the opposite, “responsible” things: increasing taxes or decreasing benefits.
I believe it's called the Two Santas theory. Democrats are the Santa who wants to increase spending while Republicans are the Santa who wants to cut taxes.
It's that the previous expense are also subjected to inflation. And as more and more people are parking their investment in things like ETF and Crypto, you can't tax that until they cash out.
This means the US revenue more or less is stagnant, but the need for things like social security increases as population increases. And with infrastructure aging, you also need more maintenance.
This is why the economy NEEDS to keep growing, and why "growth slowed down" is a really bad sign. It won't affect us in the short term, but 2 decades out. It will all hit at the same time.
A common misconcept about defence is that US is pissing away all that money. This is false. The defence budget is both maintenance AND personnel, US military IS a giant part of the local economy. Some towns are practically proper up by local members' spending. Only 17% is actually spent on r&d, or "military complex".
This is why the talking point is fking moot, because things like "this program cost trillions", that trillion is spread across the years, and include not just the frame, but maintenance and supplies. The later which provides jobs across sectors. It's same as "tax the rich". It's not the same as traditional sense that you can just apply a direct cut into.
"Just axe some program" is a easy notion, except you still need that capability, and canceling existing contract creates fines that sometimes outright exceeds the savings. Don't get me wrong, there are waste in the process, but to find the waste require colossal accounting effort.
"Just socialize everything" is a great notion, until you start the first step. I can tell you from first hand experience, trying to simply digitalized and catalogue your local town hall history record ACCURATELY will take mine boggling amount of time. it's not a simple "let's just slap it on" that can solve the issue.
That being said, US isn't even willing to take the first step, so this is more or less fantasy.
So there's really only 2 ways to balance a budget and they are both difficult.
First, you can cut spending. Problem with cutting spending in the US especially (but also in general) is that governments are not corporations. For every dollar you cut your lose some amount of revenue both directly (who ever you were paying that dollar to is bo longer making that dollar and so 8s no longer being taxed on making it) and indirectly (most spending programs generate some amount of value on top of the people they employ. UsAID, for example, bought up surplus stocks of food that offered security to farmers. Losing USAID dollars may result in bankruptcy for a farmer meaning you lose both the tax on the amount you were spending and the tax on all the farmers other sales. Also bad, food costs go up and people starting spending less. You can minimize damage if you're careful where you cut (see Clinton) and if you wait for a period of higher than desirable inflation but there's always some damage done and, frankly, the US doesn't really have many excessive spending programs left.
Second, you can raise taxes. That can mean direct increases in income tax or the addition of more tax brackets or eliminating the cap on social security or closing loopholes and tax breaks that allow corporations to pay significantly less than they otherwise would or some combinationof the above, jr all of the above. Problem is, thats wildly unpopular. A massive portion of the US has been trained to believe that taxes are evil and increasing them is the worst possible thing. Everyone wants more of their "hard earned money" ignoring that thats an incredibly short sighted view.
It leaves no good options for a politician who wants to keep being a politician and most do want that in the same way that most people want to keep their jobs.
What you can do, however, is lean on inflation. Inflation effectively increases the tax rate while also looking like you're not cutting spending. Oh, sure, the spending dollars won't go as far and servoce woll get worse but, if you're on the right politically, thats an added win for you as you point to poor service as a reason to privatize or climate services. Even better for Conservatives inflation is a regressive tax in that it overly punishes the poor while leaving the wealthy relatively untouched without most right wing voters understanding that. Inflation won't work indefinitely but with the petrodollar and US hegemony, it can last a remarkably long time. Of course Trump is in the process of killing the shit out of that but well see.
Under Democratic administrations, the budget picture improves substantially. Saying that we can't balance the budget ever isn't correct. Believing that supports the Republican philosophy that government is ineffective except for the military.
Because voters are impossible to please, and they force every elected rep to kick the can down the road. Everyone wants the government to spend more carefully, but what they really mean is "don't touch that thing that affects me, you should spend more on that. Cut those programs I don't like or use". Except that for every dollar you want to cut, there's a voter screaming that you cannot cut that dollar.
Then you get "small government" republicans playing budget chicken. They are quick to cut taxes, usually heavily favouring the rich, without replacing the revenue. They usually try to cut some high profile programs that are popular among democrats, but rarely do they actually bring spending down. They also spend like drunken sailors and don't give a shit about the debt or deficit until they are out of office, then they lose their fucking minds. Yet somehow they have such effective marketing that they're able to paint democrats as the fiscally irresponsible ones.
Businesses love this because a lot of the republican freebees come their way - though to be fair lots of democrats get in on this too. That's why healthcare will never be fixed - both sides get too much money from the insurance companies to ever consider single-payer.
Democrats are stuck - they want to build and improve but are usually left with such a disaster after a republican administration that their choice is to be frugal and responsible (Clinton balanced the budget) or spend and just don't worry about it (Obama, Biden) because the opposition will freak out no matter what they do.
There's just no real incentive for either side to control spending.
What is really needed is someone who tell voters the truth - that you can't have whatever you want without increased taxes and making the wealthy pay their share. But voters hate politicians who tell the truth, that's why they never win. Democracy is simply an expression of human nature and the preference of comforting lies over uncomfortable truth.
The problem isn't that voters are impossible to please. The problem is that voters are lied to. They are told that cutting taxes will actually lower the debt. They are told that people in other countries will pay the tariffs. They are told that Social Security is paying billions to dead people. They are told that Mexico will pay for walls.
The first step in solving a lot of problems is stopping the tsunami of misinformation.
Look up the most common narratives on Reddit, and even this sub. The common layman think it’s the military spending (800B) and not social spending (2.6T) that is bankrupting the country.
So called college educated people can’t even read a budget to see where the most realistic cuts are.
Edit: We get the politicians that reflect our collective financial knowledge. We can have zero military spending and you numbskulls will still get angry that we have to cut social spending. Medicare is a socialized system- can’t blame the private system on that.
I had a coworker tell me our foreign policy was great and that those actions in Venezuela and the threats toward Greenland were I portent because “America was going broke”.
So I said the rich could pay more taxes. To which he replied I was against the rich and didn’t want them to exist. I can tell you that’s not true. But it was a weird conversation.
> and that those actions in Venezuela and the threats toward Greenland were I portent because “America was going broke”.
This person thinks the exploitation of Venezuela and Greenland are going to balance the federal budget? plz tell me who his dealer is so I can try what he is on
I just meant personally speaking I’m not against the existence of the rich but I do believe that the higher tax brackets need to pay a higher rate. It’s not all or nothing so the choice wasn’t even real.
I mean can’t there be rich people without having so many poor?
If everything that inconveniences the rich betrays a feeling of "hating" them, then what do we call how they feel about the poor as they actively rob us blind?
One side of the aisle continuously accuses the other of raising taxes and spending too much. The other side of the aisle spends just as much, if not more, but they borrow it to spend it.
I know the economics of a huge government is not straightforward, however it is a fact that borrowing to spend and then paying interest on what you borrowed is never the better deal.
You can't always apply household economics to government economics, but sometimes you should. Maxing out the credit card on shopping binges is wildly irresponsible and wholly typical of the GOP.
It wasn't the national debt that caused the bond markets to freak out, it was Trump (whom Griffin supports) engaging in moronic saber rattling against allies.
> “If U.S. Treasuries are viewed as being at risk because the United States is not seen as creditworthy, then bonds and stocks will move together in price. That will result in bonds having a much higher demand yield in the marketplace, so mortgage rates will be higher; the cost for us to finance our deficits will be higher,” Griffin said.
If only there’s a way to make revenue by the US government someway that was progressive and tied to income or wealth… maybe we should cut that and do regressive fees for service /s
It's worked the hundreds of other times we've tried and the deficits magically went away entirely after every other example, so I think you're right, best we try it again. After all, it works!
Yeah, that's the goal. Drown the plebs and useless eaters because tech bros and oligarchs in board rooms are what actually make the world work. And in the minds of those oligarchs and tech bros, robotics and automation (which they think will be controlled by said oligarchs and tech bros) will do all the actual work.
Kicking the can down the road would be an improvement, instead they are cutting more taxes for the rich and are increasing the deficit with more spending.
Austerity hasn't worked anywhere. Every country that did it is worse off, because it was about cuts to social programs, infrastructure, schools, health, etc. to fund tax breaks for the rich.
It is literally a way to funnel money from the poor to the rich.
We have an inflation problem. There is too much money in the economy. But the lower and middle classes don't have any of it. You can't solve the inflation by taking money exclusively from people who don't have it. Fixing the inflation problem necessarily requires taking money out from large concentrations of money. ie. The rich and massive businesses.
Should we even file taxes (2024-2025) when our own politicians are corrupted as hell!! Nah man I’m tired of this crap!
“Ooo you still owe 4 thousand dollars after the 50 thousand dollars you’ve contributed to taxes this year, thank you for your time “
ARE WE KIDDING OURSELVES?!?
Oh wait, but I’ll be imprisoned if I don’t pay my taxes, but our president’s millionaire/billionaire buddies, and himself go on terrorizing the world !? Come yall! Wake up!
It only works if we all all together don't pay our taxes one year. But then I reckon that year after is gonna look pretty damn Ugly. Gotta start somewhere though.
I’m a 90s kid, I grew up listening to our musical radicals here in the U.S.: S.O.A.D, RATM & others. When I listen to their songs now… I’m baffled. Their lyrics are exactly what we are seeing today.. relative to decades ago!
I agree with you, we have to start somewhere…
What warning? I used to believe the national debt was a real problem. Now I'm not even so sure because the numbers it reaches it really starts to get absurd. Like really absurd. We all agree how absurd it looks.
Yet nothing ever happens. Why does nothing happen if it's that existential? I guess you can say it hasn't happened yet... But that doesn't seem all that helpful.
Best the GOP can do is gut Social Security and Medicare while adding more tax cuts for billionaires to add another $10 trillion to the debt over the next five years.
The national debt is a transfer of wealth to contemporary billionaires from future generations. It makes no sense.
Social services and immigrants are not the cause of the deficits, no matter what we are told.
I think the trump administration sees their effect on the debt to be a part of destroying what America stands for, similar to attacking NATO and Minneapolis.
Well a certain someone has been responsible for 25% of America’s debt piling 10T on the deficit (so far) in 5 years of presidency. And they claim they are the party of fiscal responsibility and economics…. Just better at messaging since this ain’t true imo
No need for explicit warning - just look at the gold price. XAU is up 164% over 5 years and the stock market only around 80%. Its death by a thousand cuts over time to the value of the USD.
The biggest part of that debt is all that QE still floating around from the fed. People pretend its the governments budget but that's small potatoes to that QE debt still out there. Tell the fed to actually do its QT.
Fed balance sheet shows they are still around $2.4Trillion out there more than before covid. The annual deficit of the government is around $1.7Trillion. But its the taxpayers who have to tighten their belt first not the banks and ceos of those banks that still have that $2.4Trillion of welfare? How about we start with the banks QE welfare first.
Bond rates are an expression of risk vs confidence.
Doing stupid things like erratic unhinged decisions to threaten allies for no good reason whatsoever undermines confidence and raises the pricing of risk.
There’s no reason the rule has to apply to everyone that owns the asset class. We have progressive taxation and progressive and regressive benefits all over the system.
Republicans will try to solve the debt crisis by cutting the programs that help the most vulnerable citizens rather than raise taxes on the wealthiest who can afford to pay them.
The richest country in modern history has managed to convince the plebs we're on the edge of bankruptcy and that's why we can't have healthcare. Meanwhile: more billionaire tax cuts!double the Pentagon budget!
Halving the $839B defense budget would be a great start. The fact that the DOD can't audit its spending should be enough for anyone to realize it's by far the biggest area of waste, fraud, and abuse. Every other nation could do the same thing DOD does, but with 1/3 the budget. Why? They properly account for their spending and identify waste, fraud, and abuse.
Yes, but the debt is 1/3 a taxes problem and 2/3 a reckless spending problem.
Deficits are persistent over the last 50 years, with the exception of some responsible management during the Clinton admin. The long tail of deficits exceeding 4% following the 2008 recession and COVID are very concerning.
Taxes seem to max out around 19% of GDP, and typically average around 17%.
Spending has consistently exceeded 20% of GDP in the last 15 years and is growing. Clinton admin got the budget under control, largely by cutting spending way below 20%.
It would be very hard to get taxes close to 20% of GDP since that would be an all time high (at least as far back as the FRED data goes, 1929). What needs to happen to get deficits below 3% of GDP is a reduction in spending.
To everyone saying, “okay, cut the military budget,” the military budget has been declining as a percentage of GDP over that last 50 years.
The largest growing expenses are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt. The fact of the matter is that we need to make hard cuts here.
One obvious one is we need to lift the age of eligibility for social security. We haven’t raised the age since 1983, and that was only from 65 to 67. The life expectancy in 1930s when social security was created was about 60 for men and 63 for women. Today it is between 76-78 years old. Yes, the numbers are bit skewed by reductions in infant mortality, but the age still needs to be raised by more than just 2 years. It was originally supposed to an insurance program in case you lived too long.
The number of people paying into social security per SS recipient has declined from 5.1 workers/recipient in 1960 to 2.7 workers/recipient in 2024.
Then why not do all of those things together?
Why does it always have to be, “It’s not that simple. So let’s just not even consider that”?
They cut programs that barely make a dent in our total spending, and the taxing the rich part never comes to fruition.
Cutting spending and deregulation isn’t enough on its own either. But republicans never want to admit that. They just wait for a democrat to take over again and raise taxes because they know that gets more negative press than spending cuts and deregulation. Then back to the campaign trail to lambast the democrats for “taxing Americans to death.” Then they take back power, cut the taxes back again and we go through this all cycle all over again.
Yes, you need to do both, but taxes only gets you 1/3 of the way there and the remaining 2/3 has to come from spending reductions. People on Reddit love to harp on taxing the rich, but never want to entertain the bigger part of the problem, which is record high levels of spending.
So, the thing about raising the eligibilty age of social security is that it is not just a number. It's, you know, age. There is an upper threshold to where that number can realistically go that makes sense. And by makes sense, I mean: 1) upholding the ideals and promise of social security, where folks don't have to work to the age of borderline decrepitness to draw it, and 2) providing enough incentive to the American workforce that they want to contribute and not buck the system. Who the hell wants to be told "You've paid in to social security all your life in the greatest, richest nation in history, but you still need to hang in there a bit longer because, boy, we couldn't solve military expenditures or progressive taxes. So please work until you are 70."
Edit: Also, you stated social security was intended to be insurance "in case you lived too long". GTFO with that. The intent was never for Americans to work until we literally drop dead, but here's a little cash if you beat the odds. It was explicitly intended for the opposite: to foster the bottom rung and budding middle-class into an era where they could retire with some degree of dignity, which was largely a luxury not afforded to the working class before.
It is an insurance program that collects annual premiums and then pays out if you become disabled, old, or your wage earning spouse dies. In other words, get paid if you are too old to support yourself.
People live much longer now than they did in the 1930s, and many are capable of working longer.
Also, progressive taxation and military spending are missing the bigger picture. The government is spending more money than ever on benefits for the elderly, and none of these benefits were funded appropriately with taxes, but instead funded with debt, i.e. future young people’s taxes.
Re: payments if you live too long: Maybe that wasn’t the stated intent, but with life expectancy at 60 and the retirement age 65 it was certainly programmed that way and was sustainable that way.
The numbers don’t math out when life expectancy is 76-78, retirement is 67, and the ratio of working people to retired people is cut in half.
Lastly, the government breaks promises all the time. That’s why we shouldn’t be advocating for a bigger government. It is already spending a record level percentage of our GDP, from the last 50 years.
I think this is why the scotus tariff ruling hasn’t happened. It could potentially bankrupt the USA, à la Greece. Maybe that’s what Trump wants, China, Japan and UK own large portions of their debt and collect interest payments from USA.
I agree. The regime and its inner circle are going to siphon as much as they can before they peace out to their private islands and bunkers leaving a populace to deal with Africa levels of poverty and fighting over table scraps.
Trump tweet incoming: DONT LISTEN TO KEN GRIFFEN. He is a terrible baseball player from the war zone of Cincinnati. I was a much better player than him and his son Ken Griffen Jr. Bad players, bad economists. I’m a better economist with better genes. Wharton.
Don't worry. The Republicans will scream bloody murder about spending the next time Democrats are in power. Until then, though, they'll spend like drunken sailors.
I have an idea! Let’s tax the ultra wealthy go non existence. We can make up the rest by locking up those perpetrating violence against our neighbors and charging to chuck tomatoes at them.
Fuck the bond market. Why the hell are they dictating anything? It's long past time to tell the bond vigilantes, like every other country on the planet has already done, to fuck off.
In order to address our fiscal issues, we will need to raise taxes. Period. End of story.
Lower income folks cannot be exempt from taxes. Most western industrial countries do not exempt the poor and have them pay at least some taxes.
We probably need a VAT. Won’t be popular either but it does increase revenues.
Taxes in the middle and upper classes will likely also need to rise.
Get rid of the maximum contributions to fica.
As for our existing entitlement programs, they need reform. Living longer means raising the bar for collection. Increases in age requirements for both Medicare and social security are a must. Move them to 70 since we live to 80. Mitigating spending should help curb the deficit
These will not be popular. But the GOP is already there so implement them.
Payroll taxes are paid by everyone- and those programs make up the majority of government spending. Even people who pay 'no federal income taxes' are still paying a 15.3% payroll tax (Because the 'employer portion' is absolutely taken into account when it comes to total employee costs) as a baseline.
So when you say they shouldn't be exempt from taxes, do you mean to say, "The tax baseline of 15.3% is too low and needs to be raised."?
No i will do just that for the reasons i pointed out.
“Taxes will likely need to rise on the middle and upper classes”. As if that’s the last resort or a consequences for the “lower class” not being able to take the burden of taxation.
A better way to say this would be “taxes would need to be raised for everyone”.
Instead it was a sentence on how “we would likely need to do it”.
Lower income folks are not exempt from taxes currently, so it's weird you phrased it as if they are. Like, what are you even alluding to by wording it that way?
I agree with Ken Griffin. It will have to start with removing social welfare programs and seizing all wealth over 1 billion. Oh you can’t leave the country. Otherwise you will be in jail for treason.
Nah, Trump will just line his pockets and his inner circles for the next 3 years with skyrocketing obscene debt, and then when the chickens come home to roost, he will just blame Biden/Obama/Whoever. He's never taken personal responsibilities for his mistakes and never will. The nation will be cleaning up his messes for decades after he is gone.
With a never predictable child guiding the USA, who likely forewarns his financial bros about his announcements so they can position themselves for windfalls as he waffles/'does a deal', the common folks with their 401/403 are the big losers. With the 5% threshold met on bond markets, no one dare retire because there is no (even hedged) guarantee that their money will be there. I've lived through three major market devaluations because of bubbles, and I am still working into my seventh decade because not even straight-up savings and bonds are stable. Maybe after the Republicans regain their cognitive powers and courage and the Democrats actually field strong, likable, electable national candidates, might I finally leave the workforce.
>Rutger Bregman saying the real issue that needs tackling is tax avoidance. 'We can invite Bono once more but come on we've got to be talking about taxes ... all the rest is bullshit in my opinion,'
You’re right that would be intuitive if we’re talking about the dollar amounts, but we are talking about tax burden relative to other income brackets. This is the crux of the article - the income of the top 1% of earners grew faster than other income brackets, while the tax burden did not grow as much.
The article specifically calls out that a significant portion of the increase in income amongst the top 1% of earners is from realized capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate than payroll.
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bailtail | a day ago
Pretty sure the bond market warning that was sent was “don’t fuck up the international world order by doing stupid shit like trying to take over NATO allies”. That’s when everybody started offloading bonds. There’s no faith in US leadership or for US to be a reliable and responsible party on the international stage.
PincheVatoWey | 20 hours ago
They're tied together. The same guy that is upending the international order is also trying to fire the FED governors and install his puppets. It looks like SCOTUS will protect the FED, and Trump ended up pulling another TACO on Greenland. But the fact that a maniac can become President and threaten to do these crazy things makes bond traders more skeptical of the country's ability to pay its debts without default or inflating it away.
Think_Concert | a day ago
“US leadership” is a reflection of its people. So the bigger question is why aren’t Americans doing anything about it?
IAmNotARacoon | a day ago
Realistically, the people still have way too much to lose. Even if the majority want better, they aren't willing to lose their jobs to protest endlessly. It will get worse before it gets better.
Call-to-john | 21 hours ago
This is it exactly. For some sort of revolution, you need 25-45 year old men in particular to feel pain and a loss of quality of life. Nothing changes until this cohort feels strong negative consequences.
Reagalan | 21 hours ago
We have been feeling a quality loss, but it's been gradual enough to be adaptable.
Lots of quiet quitting and lying flat.
CatLord8 | 20 hours ago
The support in that demographic is reducing a surprising amount
CaribouYou | 20 hours ago
Men aged 25-45 willing to fight in a revolution are already fighting one. Even if the rest of you dont accept it.
Fragrant-Potential87 | 14 hours ago
We already do but we've been pacified and distracted with stuff like the manosphere and our general entertainement.
solomons-mom | 21 hours ago
Exactly. A cohort of men did feel pain. Then a candidate called them deplorable. So they voted for the candidate who showed up in places like rural Wisconsin that the other csndidate found deplorable.
an_hero_for_america | 11 hours ago
>So they
shat in the pool so nobody can swim
solomons-mom | 11 hours ago
Nobel winner Paul Krugman: >I think maybe the thing I'm least proud of is that I missed one of the important problems of globalization. I thought it was on the whole a good thing, but that it would be problematic.
>But what I missed was the way that the impact would be concentrated on particular communities. So we can look and say that the China shock displaced maybe one or two million U.S. manufacturing workers. A million-and-a-half people are laid off every month, so what's that?
>But what I missed was that there would be individual towns that would be in the path of this tidal wave of imports from China that would have their reason for existence gutted. >Economist Paul Krugman on how political attitudes changed with U.S. economic shifts | PBS News https://share.google/Rur85fvkdlxU7MaHX
Yep, but the local pool for deplorables had closed a couple decades, so they went to pools at polite country clubs.
I don't like it, but the revolution already started. Will it turn into a civil war, or will people dial back the rhetoric? If reddit comments are indicator...
radiatardation | 16 hours ago
You’re not wrong but neither was she.
cloudeater95 | 12 hours ago
Yeah she got defeated by a army of deplorables because she was one herself and screwed the american people just like the dnc. Im a democrat btw.
TopSpread9901 | 12 hours ago
Weehhhh waaaahhhhh
Word1_Word2_4Numbers | 21 hours ago
We also have a culture of individualism and narcissism. As a society, we don't have any fucking idea of how to work together. And the institutions that have been set up to organize people are usually overrun with sociopaths at the top, and working more like MLM fundraising organizations and not addressing the problems they were set up to solve.
harrumphstan | 15 hours ago
Yup. Our failure as a society is that we never actually learned to treat each other as valuable parts of that society. Too much “mUh RuGgEd iNdiViDUaLiSm” and not enough, “hey, brother, are you okay?”
EnCroissantEndgame | 14 hours ago
Are we allowed to terminate the current republic and create a second one? France is on their what, FIFTH one already? They started their first one shortly after the United States constitution was ratified. Thats five entire republics since we started our first one. They at least were able to say "hey guys this really isnt fucking working, we need to start over" and admit that their previous constitutions had some serious problems that needed to be fixed. We are too hardheaded to admit this so we force ourselves to suffer.
nooby_goober | 23 hours ago
Our employee rights have been systematically repressed to force employees into grateful-obedience.
CyberneticSaturn | 16 hours ago
Realistically, if Americans begin an armed revolt or general strike, which are the only actual options before elections occur, it will be even worse for the bond markets than the current insanity.
harrumphstan | 15 hours ago
But conceivably better in the long run.
hetantwoordis42 | 16 hours ago
They still have some means now. It's not going to get better if they do nothing.
Pinelli72 | a day ago
I reckon plenty of people are doing what they can short of civil war, which would have a very uncertain outcome and kill huge numbers of people. There are more desirable outcomes that take a bit longer.
hetantwoordis42 | 16 hours ago
All of you are saying that, meaning that none of you is doing it
Acrobatic-Formal4807 | 14 hours ago
Right now fascism is hitting individual cities. Reach out to your local community right now and start organizing. ICE/CBP is the paramilitary. I’m planting a garden, getting firearms and ammo , and stockpiling food and supplies. If you want there are CPR and Stop the Bleed classes that are offered through the community. You can also take FEMA training through your county. Learn your civil rights. If you care about immigrants you can apply as a volunteer through Interfaith Welcome Coalition. Get involved in your local political scene. Gas masks if you’re going to protest, medic supplies , good tourniquet etc , shatter free goggles etc . Good luck to you
Realistic_Board_5413 | 22 hours ago
We elected Trump president again and gave his Republican sychophants the house and Senate when they already had the supreme court. You really think we are smart enough to protestt effectively?
poilk91 | 21 hours ago
They are. Huge protests on freezing weather. Protestors are out here being arrested and killed in broad daylight to stand up to this and you the brave little keyboard warrior ride in smugly on your high horse. Pathetic
False-Discipline-640 | 16 hours ago
Trump won the electoral college and the popular vote there's no going around that
poilk91 | 12 hours ago
Okay well I'll let you know when that's what we're arguing about
Think_Concert | 9 hours ago
So you think mob politics is the answer? Like J6?
poilk91 | 9 hours ago
So Americans aren't doing enough but when they do protest they are doing too much. You could at least try to have a consistent position
Think_Concert | 8 hours ago
Protesting in a blue/purple state accomplishes what, exactly? I’m old enough to remember OH, FL, etc. being battlegrounds. What happened? Is more concentration and more navel gazing in deep blue states going to change any of this? THINK!!
Let’s start by getting rid of Chuck Schumer (and everyone else from NY) from leadership. The strategy of betting it all on college-educated white collar city dwellers is completely bankrupt.
poilk91 | 8 hours ago
People are literally dying standing up to fascist secret police attacking minorities in the street and you call THAT navel gazing while you hand ring about electoral politics the. I was right to call you pathetic
Think_Concert | 7 hours ago
You don’t understand how the political process works, so there is no need to further engage here.
literal_garbage_man | 23 hours ago
Stupid thing to say
Big-Broccoli9094 | a day ago
Its not because the will of the people is actively sabotaged and subverted by nefarious actors.
Even after the civil war, white Americans cannot help but get drunk off the lie of White Supremacy.
White supremacy always get in the way of America doing the right thing and has never and will never be eradicated because white people cling to it, and any white person in the world can immigrate here and join the drunken hate
atfricks | 23 hours ago
What makes you think they aren't?
Payment6 | 23 hours ago
This is getting so old.
So your research before you talk shit.
Mostly__Relevant | 23 hours ago
What’s a bond?
CapitalPunBanking | 23 hours ago
Fuck off fed.
podcastofallpodcasts | 21 hours ago
It's been hijacked
Ellisville15 | 21 hours ago
Because they are shooting innocent people in the face with no repercussions
gravity_surf | 21 hours ago
brainwashed, disenfranchised. honestly unless youre the type to look for it i can see how someone would miss it. theyre boiling the frogs from room temp
ShootPosting | 19 hours ago
I still gotta go to work
soboshka | 19 hours ago
They’re too busy protecting illegal immigrants, rioting in churches, and trying to run over federal agents. All stuff that doesnt make much of a difference to the rest of the world.
Blitzende | 19 hours ago
It's a reflection of who has a voice in the US. Citizen United made cash equal a voice, and the head dog of DOGE alone has roughly two thirds of a trillion voices.
Herban_Myth | 17 hours ago
Because everyone has a price?
Call the bondsman
softwarebuyer2015 | 15 hours ago
Good question.
mr_herz | 14 hours ago
Why would anyone do anything about this if this is what was wanted?
HomeworkInevitable99 | 14 hours ago
Many Americans think foreign countries pay the tariffs, they are not going to understand bond markets.
MetallicGray | 13 hours ago
This always bothers me. Each one the 50 states is the size and population of an entire country in Europe. That makes it incredibly difficult to simply protest your way to change. You can’t shut down the whole country like you could in France or Italy with a few tens of thousands of people. Tens of thousands of people are turning out in Minnesota and did shut the biggest city down for a day.
Now, I’m 4000km away from that state… it literally is a foreign land and if it weren’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have even known there were protests occurring today.
scuddlbutt | 11 hours ago
They're routinely in the streets, calling their reps, voting, and organizing strikes. Ask because they feel the leadership is NOT reflecting them.
max_power1000 | 11 hours ago
Even if everyone rioted, this isn’t a system where snap elections are built in to the process. The line of succession is well defined, so after Trump is Vance (arguably worse in many ways) and beyond that is Johnson (lawful evil at best?). Republicans in general and the Trump admin specifically have functionally unchecked political power until January 1st next year assuming dems win the midterms.
The only alternative right now is really violent overthrow, and I don’t think anyone is willing to go that far just yet.
Modsaredumbcunts | 21 hours ago
the people are... it's the democratic leadership that is failing to fight. they are owned by the same donors as the republicans... they are paid losers. so, yes, the people are fighting fascism, when our "leaders" are just fine with it. it's a fucking uphill battle, with no help from government.
Illustrious-Lime-878 | 23 hours ago
Right, like debt is a long run issue, but deficits are balanced against demand for US debt. And the acute problem here is the rupturing of the global order as the Canadian PM called it that is affecting demand for US debt that has supported deficits, its a far bigger risk than just the amount of the national debt.
Old_Needleworker_865 | a day ago
And we just finished year 1 of this bullshit
throwawaygoawaynz | 22 hours ago
You sell bonds. That means someone else buys bonds.
If other nations are desperate to sell their US government debt and lower the price, someone will buy it. Either private US institutions or the US Fed. Not only that, a lot US government debt in Europe is held by private institutions who aren’t going to shoot themselves in the foot over Greenland, Canada, or anything.
The US has a lot more capital than Europe. The economy is huge, this is not Zimbabwe we’re talking about. Their markets have deep pockets. Europe sells, they will buy.
Meanwhile European banks would lose a lot of money over this, and crush their export market to the US because they won’t be able to swap t-bills into USD, which ultimately is going to hurt them more.
Decoupling from the US is a 20-30 year process, and will require serious long term commitment from both public AND private sectors, along with a lot of self sacrifice that humans just don’t have the will to do, despite how angry everyone is now.
I’m not American, hate what they’re doing, etc, but this power fantasy of a US government debt collapse due to a tiny fraction of European governments offloading a tiny fraction of debt is just that, a fantasy.
Miented | 19 hours ago
The biggest Dutch pension-fund has in 2025 lowered their US bonds by a third, that is from 29 to 19 billion.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
10 billion in a 34 trillion bond market?
Miented | 18 hours ago
Yup, but the number that is concerning, is that ABP since April 2025 has limited its exposure to the US bond market with a third.
And all the Dutch pension funds together are after that big Norwegian slush fund, the second biggest in the world.
So on trillions it is not much, but i doubt that ABP is the only one who is adverse of the risk of the current US economy.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
I hear you. I shouldn’t senselessly dismiss the signal.
I suppose my question is - where did they put that $10 billion which is more secure than the US government?
Miented | 18 hours ago
Dutch and German bonds, because the purpose of bonds are stability.
AlexW_WxelA | 16 hours ago
I think if you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot, gently offloading bonds seems like a wise plan. The risk part of the equation has dramatically shot up and so the value of these bonds has decreased, and by the looks of it will continue to decrease. And every party is seeing this happen at the same time, which also reduces demand. You don't want to be the bagholder
With the risk up, you're probably better off with some other risky bets. Perhaps a basket of bonds from various places rather than such a heavy reliance on US bonds only?
brendamn | 23 hours ago
This is true, but they have been cutting rates and bond buyers don't give a fuck, they are wanting a better not so risk free rate
FarFromHomey | 17 hours ago
OKAY. Lets TAX the Bootlicking Billionaires that put the Mfer in Power. How about a.PATRIOT TAX on BILLIONAIRES of say 90%? Restructue Tax Brackets DOUBLE for Ultra Millionaires and NEPO Babies. And no dumping stocks to pay for it w o major penalty.. musk did 100+ Million to Trump. He's benefitted 10 fold.. we're out in the cold
Glad-Cry8727 | 16 hours ago
Trump is emotionally incapable.
jcdoe | 16 hours ago
Right, AFAIK there was never any issue with the economics of treasury bonds. The issue is that Europeans don’t want to financially support a country that is threatening to go to war with them.
I’m sure the Europeans would love not to have to upend their pension programs because 50.3% of American voters liked the fascist in 2024, but what can you do. I also didn’t want the damn Stazi 2.0 to terrorize Minnesota either, but hey, 50.3% of voters… (still pissed)
geneticdeadender | 13 hours ago
In 2023, the Fed couldnt sell all their bonds. They had to buy them.
When thst happens it ALWAYS signals the end of a fiat currency.
Look at gold and silver right now. And land and stocks. Money is looking for a safe place to park.
Clean_Brilliant_8586 | a day ago
Didn't see anything in the article that mentioned raising taxes, and rich conservative talking about balancing the budget just means further cutting programs like Social Security or taking them private so ticks like this guy can have something else to feed on.
But I'm not bitter.
zech83 | a day ago
You'll bloody love this:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/how-the-middle-class-was-hollowed-out-from-1979-to-2022-according-to-new-federal-data/ar-AA1ULMEJ
Busterlimes | a day ago
I can answer this in one word, why does it need a whole article.
Reaganomics
General_Mars | a day ago
aka neoliberalism
Busterlimes | a day ago
Corporate consolidation. . . . .
jcpick | 18 hours ago
Crony capitalism
Busterlimes | 18 hours ago
Or just capitalism. . . .
unclefisty | 12 hours ago
That's not quite accurate. Neoliberalism is Reagonomics but 10% lighter. Which is TOTALLY an important difference.
70ms | a day ago
He’s the thumbnail when I shared the link. 👍
djtodd242 | a day ago
Still true:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgcbXn-qomg
Planterizer | 23 hours ago
If you read the article actually no.
Busterlimes | 22 hours ago
The article is wrong then. You can clearly see the K shaped economy starts at Reagan. It his shitty trickle down theory (renamed supply side economics) has shit all over the foundation of America's economy since day 1. His single act of throwing out the 12 year running IBM Antitrust suit, a case that cost IBM the equivalent of the entire budget of the DOJ each year. Reagan set the precedent for corporate consolidation and in that time we have seen the number publicly traded companies be cut in HALF.
Remarkable-Okra6554 | a day ago
In other news…water, wet.
PleasureCircuit | a day ago
Water isn't wet.
Water can make things wet, but by itself, water is not wet. Water is just water.
chrisjlee84 | a day ago
From above:
As Penn Wharton Budget Model Director Kent Smetters recently told Fortune, “What people don’t realize is just how progressive the United States income tax system is,” by far the most progressive in the OECD. With such a progressive tax system, he added, “it’s really hard to raise a lot of revenue,” because the wealthy are paying such a disproportionate share.
kaplanfx | a day ago
They are conflating wealthy professionals with ultra wealthy. The folks paying a huge share are the hot shot surgeons or programmers who earn $1M a year in salary. The ultra wealthy basically have no income, their money is held in investments and they take out loans against those to live off and thus pay nothing in income taxes.
korben2600 | a day ago
This. Long term capital gains is just 15%. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than even those in the 22% marginal bracket ($48,476 to $103,350). And especially those paying up to 37%.
"Debbie [my secretary] works just as hard as I do and she pays twice the rate I pay. I think that's outrageous." --Warren Buffett, 2012
"There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." --also Warren Buffett, 2006
Sirpattycakes | 22 hours ago
Does Warren Buffett actually do anything for the common people, or does he just chirp about it? Has he done something like Mark Cuban has with his pharmacy business?
Genuinely asking.
Quentin__Tarantulino | 21 hours ago
I don’t think he’s done a ton. He signed that giving pledge for when he dies, and I’m sure he contributes to charities, but he’s not funding super progressive politicians in an effort to make for a more equitable society.
korben2600 | 19 hours ago
Not particularly, especially after coasting for decades on the good PR of giving away his fortune only to renege at the last minute and award control to his kids.
And he forced the 2022 strike at one of Berkshire's subsidiaries, BNSF, the largest railway the US, over the union demanding a single day of paid sick leave. Then successfully sued to block the strike in court.
But I'd argue his quotes are still relevant. It gives perspective from their side that they know the game is rigged.
MootRevolution | 11 hours ago
I think he's been the largest private donor to Ukraine, so at least there's that.
dust4ngel | a day ago
this make sense - we want to disincentivize work, so we tax it heavily. idleness, on the other hand, is a virtue, so we make sure the lazy rich get largely tax-free treatment. hopefully people get the message and stop working.
Dry-Cry-3158 | 22 hours ago
That's because loans aren't income. And loans aren't free; they pay interest on the loans. The fundamental issue with trying to tax these types of assets is that coming up with a valuation that isn't based on realization (i.e. the actual sale price of an asset when it's sold) is that it's all conjecture. The other problem is that any rule for taxing an asset class is that the rule has to apply to all owners of that asset class, which hurts the 80th to 99th percentile of wealth holders way more than the top 1% because they are typically less liquid and have to liquidate more to cover their taxes. There needs to be more to a tax proposal than mere envy and a selective analysis of facts.
Legal-Koala-5590 | a day ago
Doesn't data show progressive taxation has a direct effect on decreasing income inequality?
rogozh1n | a day ago
It appears he is complaining that it is too much of a burden on our suffering 1% and that there's no more juice to squeeze our of that lemon.
Of course, that is preposterous.
cl1518 | a day ago
The article and OP are either intentionally misleading, or the article is poorly written and they are interpreting it wrong. The 70% figure is the top quintile, when all income/wealth figures are about the top 1% of income (which includes income from realized capital gains).
The share of income going to the top 1% doubled between 1979 and 2022, while the tax burden of the whole top 20% of earners increased by only 27%.
So while the income of the top 1% doubled, their tax burden does not appear to have grown as much.
fdar_giltch | a day ago
> So while the income of the top 1% doubled, their tax burden does not appear to have grown as much
That doesn't seem like an accurate analysis of the rest of your comment. If their income increased, so did their tax burden. The tax rate doesn't have to increase for them to pay more. If their income doubles, then their taxes should roughly double as well (arguably, more, since the increased income would be at their marginal tax rate)
Legal-Koala-5590 | a day ago
Haha okay thank you. I couldn't tell if I didn't understand him or if he was that out of touch.
BigOs4All | 23 hours ago
Yes and that's only logical. Moreover, the ultra wealthy pay FAR less in percentage of their income than upper middle class folks do (making like $250k/yr, let's say).
The ultra wealthy live off of debt. It's called "Buy, Borrow, Die" accounting and it's how Bezos gets paid $80k/yr but is able to live off his equities without cashing them in.
Ultra wealthy typically pay around 10-12% in taxes. Their main source of income is long term capital gains (15%) and then they're able to lower it from there with dedications, loop holes, carry forwards, etc.
Planterizer | 23 hours ago
The American working class would riot if they paid the taxes of their euro counterparts.
TheMasturbatinCamper | 22 hours ago
The America working class would riot if they paid the taxes of the European working class. The European taxation system on whole is much more regressive than the U.S. system, considering an average 20% VAT rate in Europe.
Planterizer | 23 hours ago
Everyone should read this because it does not really support the “hollowed out” headline at all.
TrapThem | a day ago
Since when do Americans say bloody?
ringobob | a day ago
Can't meaningfully solve the problem by cutting social security, not unless you keep the social security specific tax, but stop paying it out. Anything that officially ends social security will end the tax along with it, unless they want riots in the streets.
They can cut military spending. Or raise taxes. Or do massive program cuts across the board, entirely reshaping the country.
sleepydorian | a day ago
Also important to note, that like social security, all government spending actually buys things. Medicare/Medicaid spending ends up as revenue for healthcare professionals and manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Infrastructure spending ultimately pays wages to workers and buys the materials they use, which is revenue to companies.
Cutting govt spending pulls money out of the economy. Cutting govt spending enough to start reducing the debt would be to induce an economic depression.
Not that we couldn’t cut some spending (like DHS and ICE, for example), but the answer is and always has been revenue, they just don’t want that to be the answer.
ringobob | a day ago
I was having this argument somewhere leading up to the election, when all the talk was about Musk and what would become DOGE. The guy I was arguing with was saying that government spending was essentially a closed loop - cutting spending wouldn't impact the economy because that money "wasn't doing anything productive anyway".
I asked him how the government could spend money such that it was, you know, spent, and represented an actual cost to the American taxpayer, but that it didn't go anywhere or do anything.
I never received an answer.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
You must be aware that discretionary spending is still less than the annual deficit, and thus entitlement reform is absolutely necessary.
(Even if that simply means drastically raising FICA tax rates.)
sleepydorian | 9 hours ago
Yes, even zeroing out discretionary spending, which would be a disaster, would not eliminate the annual deficit.
But what do you mean by entitlement reform? Do you think we should spend less on social security? Medicare? Veterans benefits? Veterans and seniors are already struggling.
Medicare is the only place where I can even think of savings and those savings come from negotiating better prices for things Medicare already buys, not cutting benefits or increasing cost sharing.
And why would tax increases not be part of the solution? And raising minimum wages and implementing other steps to reduce income inequality would also increase tax revenue without even changing the rates.
morbie5 | a day ago
> not unless you keep the social security specific tax, but stop paying it out
You raise the retirement age and/or you cut/reform the spousal/widow benefit. This would have to also be coupled with an increase in taxes on the upper middle class and the wealthy. And a decrease in military spending.
We have an aging population, the idea that we aren't going to be working longer is fantastical
VegemiteFleshlight | a day ago
Don’t tax the upper middle class more… our middle class is eroding. Our wealth distribution is a hockey stick, tax the wealthy more. We need more tax brackets and our tax brackets need to actually scale to reach the rich and ultra rich.
morbie5 | 23 hours ago
> our middle class is eroding
It is eroding into a bifurcated upper middle class and lower middle class. You have to tax the upper middle along with the wealthy. Taxing just the wealthy won't be enough
Planterizer | 23 hours ago
Sustainable taxation and redistribution always focuses on middle class taxes. Europe has much higher taxes on the middle class because they have already taxed their super wealthy and corporations into capital flight.
morbie5 | 23 hours ago
> because they have already taxed their super wealthy and corporations into capital flight
Global taxation regime solves that
Planterizer | 19 hours ago
Lmao
morbie5 | 5 hours ago
facts
Planterizer | 3 hours ago
Maybe after we do the global tax thing we can end all war, sing kumbaya and give everyone a pony.
morbie5 | 2 hours ago
> we can end all war, sing kumbaya and give everyone a pony.
Probably not but we can certainly collect more revenue from the wealthy
VolsFan30 | a day ago
What I don’t understand is why there’s an income cap on social security. Keep the benefits cap while removing the tax cap.
Wouldn’t entirely solve the social security solvency issue but it would make things a whole lot better.
FormalBeachware | a day ago
It solves about 60-70% of the shortfall if you just remove the income cap and still pay out increased benefits.
ringobob | a day ago
It's pretty easy to understand: the people that would have to pay more in taxes don't want to, and they have the money necessary to convince the politicians to not do it.
fucked_knee_oh_no | a day ago
This is the crux of the issue really. In regards to social security and many other sectors.
Planterizer | 23 hours ago
Look up middle class taxes in europe.
VolsFan30 | 13 hours ago
It’s not that I don’t literally understand it, so maybe I phrased that poorly.
Old_Value_9157 | a day ago
I agree, this is a no-brainer. Politicians are too scared though because, #verywealthypeople
Otherwise-Green3067 | a day ago
There is a correct answer among those three possibilities and it will be the last one they touch
giraloco | a day ago
Program cuts is not enough. It has to be much higher taxes for the super rich and corporations and much lower defense budget. I guess a value added tax excluding food and other basics is an option and it's hard to evade. Medicare for all will also save a lot of money making higher taxes less painful.
RichIndependence8930 | a day ago
ironically, the USA dipping out of the world order scene would justify the military budget being slashed (we no longer want to fight China in the Pacific/Russia in Europe). But thats not going to happen, because shareholders.
But for a brief moment back in 2024, I think thats what a lot of people on the left were kind of hoping for.
Sure, we'd lose favoritism in the EU and Japan/SK, but imagine an extra 500 billion actually going into social safety nets and other things like it.
It might even still happen (very much doubt it though). The USA does not need a bloated military budget if we are just going to focus on the Monroe Doctrine. But again, the shareholders...
Also, the fact Trump talks about the Golden Dome is proof to me that this is in no way the actual plan
zephalephadingong | a day ago
You might be surprised on the military budget. The most vital(and expensive) thing the US needs to do for national security is increase our shipbuilding capability. A strong navy is needed even if a more isolationist foreign policy is adopted, and we won't be able to lean on our allies if we do go that more isolationist route.
Sommern | 19 hours ago
Americans won’t riot in the streets and the few that do will be shot with less lethal ammo and tear gassed. What would happen would just be a sharper decline in life expectancy, which we are arguably already in since the botched COVID response and “recovery.”
The best analogue I would point to would be post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s where all the jobs and pensions were sold away and old people died of drugs, alcohol, exposure, illness, or a combination thereof.
ringobob | 19 hours ago
You'd get Republicans rioting if they ended social security but kept making us pay the tax for it. It wouldn't be social security getting them out there, it would be the tax.
RedditReader4031 | a day ago
Bring back the draft. Paying a minor stipend to cover essentials, and housing troops in the wood frame, open bay barracks that sufficed well into the 1980’s would save a fortune. Keep these young men single for at least their first two enlistment periods. The current situation with half of all members being married and eligible for base housing consumes ~50% of present DoD spending. Dependent healthcare is a major portion of that. Then impose a moratorium on all new weapons and systems procurement for at least a decade. If the B-52, with updates, can last 75 years, a tank can go 20 and a ship 50. Given Trump’s standing with our (former) allies, phase out all overseas Army and Air Force bases. Create a drawdown with a RIF to right size the force. The savings will be huge.
zephalephadingong | a day ago
>Then impose a moratorium on all new weapons and systems procurement for at least a decade.
Insanity. You really think we'll even have a military R&D capability after putting it on pause for a decade?
>If the B-52, with updates, can last 75 years, a tank can go 20 and a ship 50.
The Abrams is 46 years old at this point. Individual ships can go 50 years(depending on how beat up they get by just traveling around on the water), but ships take so long to design and build they are often behind the tech curve by the time they hit the water.
If anything the US military needs to cut down on active forces and spend MORE money on procurement. Design stuff that isn't from the cold war, and build them in numbers. Store it all in the desert to enable an easier military expansion if that is ever needed
varateshh | 11 hours ago
> The Abrams is 46 years old at this point
Tbh the Abrams tank that rolled off the manufacturing line decades ago is not the same as the one today. I would argue that at some point you got a new (or multiple new) tank that shares some design similarities but is fundamentally different. I'd argue that it changed more than than the T-72 to T-90.
zephalephadingong | 9 hours ago
I was pointing out its age in the context of a tank should be able to go 20 years with updates.
RedditReader4031 | a day ago
I noted a RIF was appropriate. Procurement needs to be restructured from top to bottom. Defense contractors need to be restricted from sourcing parts from every congressional district in the country to ensure their systems are purchased.
zephalephadingong | 23 hours ago
>Procurement needs to be restructured from top to bottom.
Mostly agreed. If the B-21 is anything to go by, the Air Force seems to have figured out procurement. The Army and Navy though.....
>Defense contractors need to be restricted from sourcing parts from every congressional district in the country to ensure their systems are purchased.
The people passing that law would be the same people who want that to happen though. Unfortunatly not realistic. It would certainly be more efficient to have military industrial hubs for the talent to congregate around.
Loop_Within_A_Loop | a day ago
it’s interesting because normally conservatives don’t care about the deficit during republican administrations and them never shut the fuck up about it when a democrats in charge
donny really must be a lame duck
Griffemon | a day ago
It’s the damndest thing, conservative politicians always say they want to reduce the deficit but spending tends to increase while they’re in charge and then they cut taxes to revenues are down as well.
And well I’ll be, the tax cuts for your average Joe often seem set to expire in a couple years meanwhile the tax cuts for huge corporations stay forever.
apb2718 | a day ago
The fact that it’s so controversial to tax the rich more but the first richest man has double the paper wealth of the next richest dude is insane. Not to mention they’d never miss the money a lot of people would kill to have just to have a slightly better life.
MANEWMA | a day ago
Fiscally irresponsible conservatives that think a tiny bit of growth is more important than the debt ..
elfescosteven | a day ago
Conservatives believe in two things.
Cutting Federal Revenue to give give tax breaks to the Ultra Wealthy.
Increasing Federal Revenue because Americans don’t deserve the shared benefits of being taxed.
absolute_cinema81 | a day ago
Hey maybe the 50th time’s the charm with trickle down economics
elfescosteven | 23 hours ago
The program is health and has longevity!
Let’s allow, mostly, Republicans to keep it funneling to the tippy top. It’s where they “believe it should go.”
None of us lame normal Americans ever complain about salaries not keeping up with costs!
korik69 | a day ago
Next year’s military budget is 1.5 trillion, how the hell do we the people get anything when it all goes to military and tax breaks for billionaires.
Seaweedminer | a day ago
There is no reason to cut SS. Literally does nothing for the deficit, besides the fact that SS holds a chunk of the debt. The largest US debt holders in the world are the Government and the Fed reserve, with largest foreign holder as Japan with only 2.6 % of holdings. When Trump cuts he is just giving to himself and his friends.
ExuberantSloth29 | 23 hours ago
Social security financing is moving towards a point where its taxes won't be able to fund benefits. At that point, the law is a bit unclear, but the most common interpretation is that benefits will have to be cut under current law. It is either that, or the law will have to be changed - cut benefits, raise taxes, change retirement age, authorize using borrowed funds from the general fund to pay for benefits, etc. So one way or another something will have to change with trust fund depletion, and if it's borrowing money from the general fund then that has implications for the national debt and interest rates.
Seaweedminer | 22 hours ago
If the SS salary cut off is removed, it won’t be an issue
ExuberantSloth29 | 11 hours ago
Estimates vary, but removing the taxable maximum fixes anywhere from 50-70% of the funding shortfall. The estimate is sensitive to assumptions related to wage growth and labor supply elasticities with respect to taxation, as well as demographics like immigration and fertility rates. But I haven't seen an estimate where that is the only change made and the funding shortfall is totally covered.
So benefits would still need to be cut if removing the taxable maximum is the only change.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
By 2033 the Social Security trust fund will be depleted and benefits will have to immediately be cut significantly.
SS needs reform, too.
maikuxblade | 16 hours ago
This is yet another symptom of the wealthy and corporations shifting their tax burden onto the rest of society who increasingly don't have the funds to cover their own survival.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 15 hours ago
I mean SS is funded by FICA payroll taxes (which corporations are obligated to contribute to) so I think I disagree.
If we need to raise them then let’s do it. My broader point was that SS is absolutely on a path to being suddenly underfunded which will cause an immediate cut to benefits.
Bannon9k | a day ago
I don't know... I'd rather be gambling the money they take from my check each week in the open market. I could already be retired...
GoalPuzzleheaded5946 | a day ago
> I'd rather be gambling the money they take from my check each week in the open market. I could already be retired...
Sure, or you could lose it/spend it all and then have nothing in retirement and then taking care of you would still be society's problem. Which is one of the main reasons why Social Security exists.
rogozh1n | a day ago
Exactly why we need it. For every 100 people like you, 95 would lose everything and be destitute.
Seaweedminer | a day ago
It’s definitely a situation of the rising tide lifting all ships.
RioRancher | a day ago
Taxing the rich fixes a lot more than cutting spending.
CaliHusker83 | a day ago
If we stole all the billionaires combined wealth, it would equate to $5.6T
If raising taxes is your answer, you need to do some research.
RioRancher | 23 hours ago
Getting wealth disparity and inflation in check is the first step.
CaliHusker83 | 23 hours ago
Inflation was 2.7% YOY which falls into target numbers.
Inflation from 2020-2024 was an average of 9% which means that something that costed $100 in 2020 costed $141.16 in 2024
That same item that costed $141.16 at the beginning of this year now costs $144.97
If you don’t like your job, change it. You’re free to do what you want in America. Stealing from others to benefit yourself doesn’t make sense in this country.
RioRancher | 22 hours ago
The white knights of the billionaires are hard to reason with. I hope they send you some appreciation cash.
CaliHusker83 | 22 hours ago
The American Dream worked for me. Went from nothing to generational wealth for my family.
Couldn’t have done it in any other country.
And my path was filled with doing things that 99% of others choose not to.
You get out that you put in. Sorry Charlie, that’s just what I believe.
RioRancher | 22 hours ago
Ah yes, and screw everyone else
CaliHusker83 | 22 hours ago
Yeah, screw everyone else that doesn’t put in the work or sacrifices to get ahead.
The ones that have shouldn’t be responsible for taking care of the rest of the degenerates that make bad life choices.
RioRancher | 21 hours ago
Yep. You’re a good person with a healthy perspective.
cloudeater95 | 12 hours ago
Idk man I can’t get behind that shit how many industry billionaires are only on top because they got ahead of regulation and pulled the ladder up behind them or paid lawmakers to make regulation super hard?
Screw everyone else is right. So why can’t you repair your own devices you buy and why are labor laws and tax laws growing more regressive.
Yeah because your life went perfect everyone else should eat shit.
I’m not enabling the American people but multiple things can be true at once but let me ask you. We can both agree there are more less fortunate then rich and not everyone can be rich right?
We also have a duty to make sure things are fair and stable as well. Like you think if things continue to go to shit if people see your address they’re gonna say well calihusker is diffeerent. No judging by that attitude you’d be counted along with them in they’re zip code
TheProfessional9 | 21 hours ago
It's just cost. Not costed
It's unfortunate, trump caused that 9% inflation. It's getting back under controll-ish and he's trying to do it again. Massive stimulus and trying to force rates to 1%
CaliHusker83 | 21 hours ago
Hey grammar queen…. Chew on this-
https://grammarist.com/usage/costed/
Able-Association914 | a day ago
Make billionaires pay taxes!
InHaUse | a day ago
That ship has long sailed. It's physically impossible to do anything besides defaulting, or what everyone usually does, inflating it away.
Breno1405 | 23 hours ago
Isn't he the guy that needed a bailout because well street bets almost Bankrupted his hedge fund?
Solid_Owl | 23 hours ago
Raise taxes on me, daddy! uwu!
Seriously, roll back all the tax cuts from the last 40 years. What else are we going to do, cut taxes all the way down to 0 to drive GDP up? Then what? I'd rather roll back all the tax cuts we didn't need and balance the budget and make sure everything is properly funded so we can destress America. Anyone who thinks we can't do that and still retain our capitalist nature and economic exceptionalism must hate America.
jmur3040 | 21 hours ago
Ken Griffin ruined Illinois and now he’s setting his sights on the United States.
Rob_Zander | 19 hours ago
It's so fucking ridiculous. The last time we had a balanced budget was Clinton. What else did we have? Higher taxes on the wealthy. Now the idea of reversing the Bush tax cuts is anathema but cutting social security is on the table...
yuppyuppbruhbruh | 18 hours ago
There's a hunger in my bellllllyyyyyy
Frowny575 | a day ago
I don't have the numbers, but considering how much we spend on the military and them wanted to dump MORE money into them/ICE I'd hazard to guess even if we cut ALL social programs we'd still not break even.
random-meme422 | a day ago
Gonna have to be a middle ground. Our entitlements are way too high and we can certainly tax in smarter ways to hit the rich.
thefastslow | a day ago
The unpopular answer is that we'll need to increase tax rates on everyone and cut spending at the same time. It'll be extraordinarily painful, but past and current generations have been selling out the future for lower tax rates and excessive spending too long.
Several-Action-4043 | a day ago
The 1% take a massively disproportionate portion of the growth and productivity every year. A massively disproportionate tax rate on them is warranted.
apb2718 | a day ago
I don’t understand why this is even remotely controversial
brianwski | 21 hours ago
> > massively disproportionate tax rate on [the 1%] is warranted > > I don’t understand why this is even remotely controversial
I don't think it is controversial, it is the current system. The top 1% pay 43% of all taxes (that's disproportionate). The top 10% pay 73% of all taxes.
I also think a progressive tax (like we have) is the only system anybody has ever figured out how to fund our society (or literally any society). I'm saying all economists agree on this, I agree with it. The wealthy MUST pay more than the less fortunate.
Now, the fact remains that we still have this deficit, and the sooner we address it the EASIER it is to address. I wish everybody would stop looking for an easy answer and do "a little of everything". Meaning we need to raise taxes on the 1% a little more, we need to raise taxes on the top 10% a little more, we need to cut military spending a little bit, we need to raise the minimum age to draw Social Security by a year or two, we need to remove the cap on Social Security contributions (but not raise benefits to anybody, that's going the wrong direction), etc.
I'll toss in one more controversial idea as follows: one of the reasons this pyramid scheme is starting to falter is formerly we always had a growing population where more and more younger people would enter the workforce and pay taxes while the older people died off. People are living a long time (drawing Social Security, and spending Medicare funds to stay alive) and our population is shrinking without immigration. So I would strategically open up a few more legal immigration spots to younger immigrants that can pay lots of taxes for a long time (their entire working careers). This isn't "fair" where immigration is a pure lottery, and it doesn't solve the humanitarian crisis of a ton of starving poor people in other countries. It's a selfish thing we can do to possibly increase the tax base and keep the pyramid scheme going for another few years. These budget deficit problems are serious, if allowing a few more higher paid immigrants into the country helps that financial situation it should at least be considered.
a_moniker | a day ago
Or we could just create a public option Health plan, so that Americans pay less for equivalent healthcare just like the rest of the developing world.
The Military budget is also way more of an issue than entitlements. We pay more for our Military than the next ten biggest armies in the world, and most of those countries are members of NATO. There’s way more money to cut out of defense spending than social programs.
jrex035 | a day ago
>Or we could just create a public option Health plan, so that Americans pay less for equivalent healthcare just like the rest of the developing world.
We can and should do this, it would save us money AND improve outcomes/access to huge swathes of the population. For profit healthcare insurance is a giant money wasting scam.
>The Military budget is also way more of an issue than entitlements
Absolutely not. In 2024 entitlements (mostly social security, medicare, and medicaid) made up $4.1T of the $6.8T in total government spending, compared with $883b in defense spending.
>We pay more for our Military than the next ten biggest armies in the world, and most of those countries are members of NATO.
That's mostly because our COL is so much higher. When adjusted for PPP Chinese spending totals ~$500b and Russia ~$400b. And even that isnt a really fair apples to apples comparison as a solid portion or our spending goes to troop salaries and benefits compared with China which is rapidly improving the quality and quantity of their equipment, quickly closing the gap with the US military.
That being said, we should be tackling corruption, fraud, and waste in our military spending to improve the outcomes from our high spending levels, not trying to cut it. We're already falling behind China in the global arms race on a number of fronts.
darryl__fish | a day ago
that's just patently false. i'm no fan of it, but the military budget is completely dwarfed by social security and medicare. we need to means test SSI and raise the cap on the tax.
OccamsRabbit | a day ago
I'm not sure that anything in that comment was false. We would pay less if we added a single payer health care option (if you want more insurance feel free to purchase it), our military budget is as big as the next 10 countries COMBINED, 6 of those countries are allies.
Means testing SSI is just a way to increase bureaucracy which always benefits the rich since they can pay someone else to deal with it. If we're going to add operating overhead (like what it would take to implement means testing) let's start with an office that tracks the effects of spending bills and then reports on the outcomes (vs expectations). After that we could do a public audit of military spending. There are many better ideas than means testing SSI.
RedditReader4031 | a day ago
That’s an incomplete comparison. Social Security and Medicare have substantial self-funding to work off of. The military does not. And no reasonable person can argue that military spending is carefully managed. Hell, DoD has never passed an audit. And they’ve know they were coming.
darryl__fish | a day ago
just google it lol
jrex035 | a day ago
It needs to be an above all approach.
There's tons of waste and fraud in the entitlements programs that could and should be cut, but we also need to raise taxes (instead of constantly cutting them), and we need to make meaningful reforms to the social safety net.
It'll never not be insane to me how little negotiating power Medicare/Medicaid have considering how many people are enrolled in those programs. In sane countries, they allow the government to negotiate prices on services and drugs by threatening providers that they will be cut off from a huge chunk of the marketplace without playing ball.
MimeGod | a day ago
Entitlements are generally separate from the budget, and are directly paid for. You pay into Social Security, you get Social Security. That's what an entitlement is. It's something you paid for, like having the title to your car.
Certain politicians just like using the word because people confuse it with a sense of entitlement.
RedditReader4031 | a day ago
Social Security was added as an item on the federal budget by LBJ to make the costs of the Vietnam War appear as a smaller share of US spending. It is divided separately and so should have separate accounting.
random-meme422 | a day ago
“Pay into” is cap. It’s far more like insurance than it is something you “pay into.” Fact is the current workers are paying for the current beneficiaries of social security. What happens when people live even longer but the population of workers decreases?
likesound | a day ago
People are collecting more than what they paid in taxes. We have also expanded benefits like Medicare part d without increasing taxes to paid for them.
Clean_Brilliant_8586 | a day ago
I really don't care. I don't care any more about the <1% than they care about the rest of us as anything other than fodder or schools of fish to be skimmed out of an infinite ocean. And I have heard both analogies from people of means in unguarded moments.
In the history of the known world, we have never been rid of this paradigm. I am well past done believing there will ever be altruistic people in power. Instead we will have these disgusting "alpha" humans constantly throwing us at each other while they wait for the spoils to manifest, constantly pushing the envelope to normalize the freakishness of their positions amongst the other animals.
They are ticks. A fanciful view of it would be the aliens from the movie "Dark City." They are not symbiotes. They are bloated parasites, unfortunately endemic to our species.
But like I said: I'm not bitter.
random-meme422 | a day ago
In the history of the world people also didn’t live this long and expect this much. Just a hundred years ago people would be dropping dead at 50-60 and they wouldn’t expect even a fraction of the quality of life as they do today. So comparing how things were like before is effectively worthless.
think_up | a day ago
Says the man who made his fortune in Chicago and left for lower taxes in Florida in retirement. Sir, you are the problem.
Markets aren’t dumb. When there’s unpredictability and a horrible budget deficit that gets worse every election cycle, smart money isn’t going to be chasing the US.
IndependenceApart208 | a day ago
He didn't just run away after he got his, he actively worked to destroy any attempts Illinois did to balance the budget that would mean increasing taxes on people like him.
korben2600 | a day ago
Same guy who helped rig the DTCC during the Gamestop fiasco to force brokers to stop allowing buys so he could salvage his billions in shorts at Melvin Capital. Dude's a financial terrorist. Fuck Ken Griffin.
DaFatKontroller | a day ago
Is that the same Ken Griffin that lied under oath? Is that the Ken Griffin we’re talking about?
Wild-Affect-4842 | a day ago
Yeah, this same guy who loves mayonnaise and who did throw a bedpost at his wife because she found Chicago "unsophisticated".
EnhancedEnhancement | 19 hours ago
The baggies have arrived
MrOnlineToughGuy | 22 hours ago
Five years later and the GME goobers are still stuck in FantasyLand lol
DaFatKontroller | 22 hours ago
Oh your gonna be sorry
humanquester | 22 hours ago
Sorry about what? When is this sorryness going to happen? Wasn't gamestop kinda a long time ago?
DaFatKontroller | 21 hours ago
If you’re not paying attention now you’ll be saying “who could have seen this coming?” soon enough
ElonBotX4TrumPeeTape | 17 hours ago
next week might be a little interesting 👍🏻
groceriesN1trip | a day ago
You pay federal taxes no matter what state you live in. He’s not a monster for moving states to pay lower state taxes.
Edit: because I’m being downvoted for keeping us on point - this entire thread is about the federal governments debt. You all can hate Ken Griffin with a passion, my comment won’t change that or attempt to alter your perception. I don’t care for the man. The state tax issue you all are harping on has nothing to do with the federal deficit/debt and federal taxes.
Hate on
DanielTigerUppercut | a day ago
No, he’s a monster for using his considerable wealth to campaign against Illinois changing to a progressive income tax…then fleeing the state afterwards.
OldMastodon5363 | a day ago
He is actually. He wants something for nothing.
think_up | a day ago
Florida has no state taxes. That’s the entire point here. He moved specifically for that reason. Made a fortune in Chicago, then left before he paid his dues.
And he took his entire company and all its employees with him. So no, it’s not just about one person choosing which state to retire in.
You guys are either woefully uninformed or weirdly trying to downplay this to defend a billionaire.
groceriesN1trip | 20 hours ago
The thread is about the federal government debt. Taxes help pay that expense.
State taxes have nothing to do with it. So, it’s an entirely separate point being made
The_Keg | 20 hours ago
I fucking hate people like /u/think_up
Pieces of shit like this is why the American debts is an actual problem.
It's impossible to advocate for cutting benefits AND raising taxes.
_kasten_ | 23 hours ago
> He moved specifically for that reason.
FWIW, he's also from Florida. Born in Daytona Beach.
yourluvryourzero | a day ago
Right! I'm not sure what kind of point they were making. Like, does this person believe we shouldn't be able to move between states? That's like the whole damn point of the US, you are free to travel or live in any state of the country. Even within states, local taxes vary, so would someone moving, in the same state, to a locality with lower taxes, be a monster? If so, I guess I am a monster for moving one city over, where the local taxes are cheaper.
DegTrader | a day ago
It is the ultimate political "Tragedy of the Commons." Voters punish anyone who suggests raising taxes or cutting benefits, so politicians are essentially incentivized to keep the party going until the music stops. Ken Griffin is right about the warning, but he’s talking to a room full of people who get fired if they actually listen to him. We keep waiting for a "painless" solution that simply doesn't exist in math or reality.
BroughtBagLunchSmart | a day ago
> Voters punish anyone who suggests raising taxes or cutting benefits
This is a blatant lie. Just tell the voters you are going to raise taxes and cut benefits for minorities and those hogs start slapping their meaty mitts together like trained seals. That is the entire republican platform.
ensoniq2k | a day ago
Aren't billionaires minorities too though?
thehalfwhiteguy | a day ago
pretty sure being a billionaire is a conscious choice, not something you’re born with. they could stop being “minorities” any time they want with some hefty donations to charities, or, oh I dunno, paying their taxes
Abominatrix | 22 hours ago
Hey man, I’m just three yachts in a trench coat. You think I can afford more taxes?
ensoniq2k | 17 hours ago
Yet people are mostly against taxing the rich
DeliciousPangolin | a day ago
Just tell people that foreign countries will pay the taxes and apparently they'll be dumb enough to believe it.
laosurv3y | a day ago
Moderate inflation and a growing economy are the closest to painless solution (for politicians).
Successful_Ease_8198 | a day ago
So many of these politicians are independently wealthy and could easily transition back to the private sector. They don’t need to worry about being fired
no_use_for_a_user | a day ago
Another solution is to steal a huge island and strip mine the heck out of it.
jrex035 | a day ago
The focus on Greenland is so, so dumb.
The reason it isn't being mined much already is because its a frozen hell hole, far from the rest of the world, that has nearly no infrastructure at all, and is bathed in darkness 3 months out of the year. The average thickness of the Greenland ice cap is 1 mile deep ffs.
It's not being mined because it's not profitable to mine it, not because Greenland/Denmark are keeping the US out (they also aren't mining it).
polar_nopposite | a day ago
>Voters punish anyone who suggests raising taxes
No they don't.
"Tax the ____"
Fill in the blank. We all know what ought to happen.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
Shoring up a $1.8 trillion annual deficit requires more than simply taxing the rich more.
We need a combination of moderate entitlement reform and increased revenue from all economic strata.
a_library_socialist | a day ago
Along with many problems of the "Tragedy of the Commons", it's the work of a right-wing conservative nutjob. It's more ahistoric than claims of barter being the norm prior to currency.
jmur3040 | 21 hours ago
Ken griffin knows how to line his pockets and lie about liberal politicians. Hes warning about things he helped cause. Fuck that clown.
IKROWNI | 18 hours ago
Ken Griffin lied under oath
ObjectBrilliant7592 | 21 hours ago
This is a financier's read on the situation. A historian would argue that we're watching dedollarization.
Rising yields aren't generating demand for government debt like they have in the past. The virtuous cycle is over. Even getting the national debt under control might not necessarily mean that demand for American or Japanese government bonds will meaningfully recover.
pvrhye | 20 hours ago
Reducing the debt would be nice, but we have countries to antagonize and there are lots of elderly naturalized citizens who haven't been drug into the cold in their underwear and had their face ground into the concrete.
colcatsup | 20 hours ago
Facts.
DeRpY_CUCUMBER | a day ago
Call me ignorant, but I just can't understand why we cant balance the budget, ever? Why are both sides in agreement that racking up trillions in new debt is better than just spending within our means?
I know most redditors will simply say that politicians are idiots, but there has to be some kind of ideology behind this. Is there some super secret way we are going to get out of paying our debts?
What are we even spending all of the extra money on?
IT feels like medicare,/ medicaid/ and veterans benefits all need to be reorganized. We need a socialized system, that can negotiate prices, and cut out all the pencil pushers and insurance companies that are leeches.
We also need a shakeup in the defense industry. Too many weapons systems come in over budget by a long shot.
Everyone is just content at bleeding the country dry.
handsoapdispenser | a day ago
Why is because every dollar of spending has a constituency and nobody wants to pay taxes. It's not hard to understand at all.
You want to cut spending? Great. Cut what? Healthcare, education, pensions, research, law enforcement, national security, veterans? Even if some of those are appealing to you, there's a lot of people who strongly disagree. You want to raise taxes? Whose taxes and why should they accept that? Given that neither party has had a filibuster-proof majority, they have to thread this needle and do it in a bipartisan way.
And compound that with the fact that Republicans are genuinely full of shit on fiscal matters. They have long clung to the provably false notion that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating growth. That being said, it's at least partly true that any reduction in government spending or increase in taxes will slow growth.
Basically it's just not that easy.
NiewinterNacht | a day ago
Clearly, funding ICE to an extreme degree is so essential.
Republicans love cutting taxes and increasing spending at the same time.
AGreasyPorkSandwich | 23 hours ago
Its called Two Santas
damnitimtoast | a day ago
…and then acting like bringing in less revenue has nothing to do with the increasing debt. I’m so tired of these fucking people.
Lucky_Dragonfruit_88 | 20 hours ago
We'll end up inflating our way out of it instead of austerity, IMO.
Nitros14 | a day ago
Modern monetary theory holds that as long as the economy is growing faster than the debt is expanding you can spend at a deficit forever and achieve more growth than you would balancing the budget.
themiracy | a day ago
Debt as a percentage of GDP has been almost monotonically increasing for fifty years … so whether MMT says this or whether this is right, the economy has not generally been growing faster than the debt (currently debt is growing about twice as fast as GDP - 2ish % GDP growth vs 5ish % debt growth).
Nitros14 | a day ago
True, but you could make a reasonable argument to never balance the budget. Since the comment above was asking why the budget is never balanced.
themiracy | a day ago
This part is true - arguably even without MMT - I think simply because debt servicing is in the federal spending. So you can run a budget deficit but if you are incurring new debt slower than you are retiring old debt, the total debt could go down.
devliegende | a day ago
The economy in nominal terms is growing at around 5%. 2.5% real GDP growth plus 2.5% inflation.
That is why the debt as percentage of GDP has been mostly steady for the last few years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/gfdegdq188S
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
Wait a second - did you even look at that chart?
It has gone up significantly the past several decades.
devliegende | 7 hours ago
Yes. When inflation and growth are both low even moderate deficits will increase the debt. When inflation is higher and growth more robust like in the last 5 years the debt will go down, even in the face of high deficits
tenuousemphasis | 17 hours ago
Modern monetary theory isn't a theory, it's a wish and prayer. It works until it suddenly doesn't.
It also assumes that growth can go on forever, which it absolutely cannot.
We are yeast, and fossil fuels are sugar. Pretty soon we're going to run out of resources and turn our environment into alcohol, and that only happens faster with faster growth.
UrbanSolace13 | a day ago
We are spending the same (or more) and reducing taxes/revenue. Despite what Republicans think, there is a bottom to tax cuts. This is like working less and charging more on your credit card. It's not great fiscal policy, but they still get automatically bumped in polling on handling the economy.
So, you have to increase taxes on top earners and likely cut some fat. You don't have to cut entitlements like most are saying. We can afford those if we practice better fiscal policy.
demagogueffxiv | a day ago
Maybe we could also not increase the military budget by 500 billion
SpezLuvsNazis | a day ago
But how else would we blow up Columbian fishing boats?!
hczimmx4 | a day ago
No, we do need to cut entitlements. The last time there was a surplus, spending was around 17.5% of GDP. Now spending is 23% of GDP. Care to guess the last time revenue was 23% of GDP? How about 20% of GDP?
Big_Wave9732 | a day ago
Pro-tip: You can cut every dollar of discretionary spending.....every cent of defense, every cent of WIC, every dollar to the FBI / CIA / ICE, all foreign aid etc....and you'd still have a 500+ billion dollar annual deficit.
We're way past the "cut entitlements" simpleton approach.
Material_Piece_3089 | a day ago
Yah we gotta tax and cut the loopholes for ultra high net worth earners. Also if we had single payer it would save the average Joe more than the potential tax increase and as long as we (congress) doesn’t purposely design it to fail (think original healthcare bill vs what passed under Obama) then the care would be better as well.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
High earners pay the most in tax, and the highest rates already. We just need to cut spending to Clinton era levels.
UrbanSolace13 | a day ago
Most in dollar amounts not in percentages. Most billionaires are living off of loans to avoid taxes. I'd wager most high earners (top 10%) aren't paying over 20% (if that on all income).
hczimmx4 | a day ago
You would lose your wager. Do you know how progressive income taxes work?
NiewinterNacht | a day ago
lmao. You can't actually be this simple.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
I am correct.
How can people in the r/Economics sub be so clueless about reality?
stickylava | 19 hours ago
Nonsense. Taxes are a fraction of what they were in the 70’s.
hczimmx4 | 14 hours ago
Oh my. So confidently wrong. The bottom 50% of earners only pay 3% of the tax collected. The top 1% pays over 40% of the tax collected.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/
And taxes are a fraction of what they were in the 70’s? I really have a hard time believing someone could be this wrong, in the r/Economics sub. How did you become so misinformed?
In 1979, the average rate for the top one percent was 22.6%. In 2020 it was 23.3%. Is that a fraction of what it was?
https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-average-federal-tax-rates-all-households
LanceArmsweak | a day ago
Jesus. Didn’t realize.
Big_Wave9732 | a day ago
Yep. With all those cuts to revenue it has been that way for about a decade now.
This chart is a little out of date because it's from 2024 and the annual interest on the debt got up to about a trillion in 2025, but it's illustrative.
Annual budget breakdown
hczimmx4 | a day ago
Your statement proves the point that so-called “mandatory” entitlements are driving spending increases, and to reduce the deficit, these programs need cuts.
Federal-Address1579 | a day ago
Did you not read. We could cut everything and still Be In a half trillion deficit
hczimmx4 | a day ago
You said discretionary. Read what you wrote again.
mittenedkittens | a day ago
Hell yeah, let’s cut Medicare/Medicaid. Do you know how much just dialysis care costs in the United States?
Big_Wave9732 | a day ago
What kind of simplistic bullshit is that?
You know what's driving this? Three tax cuts over the last 10 years that we couldn't afford. Frozen SS / Medicare tax rates (and a cap on the SS side).
You're a one trick pony that has tried nothing and is all out of ideas.
hczimmx4 | 23 hours ago
Except your tax cut claim is false. 2022 was the fifth highest revenue since WWII. And you can’t “afford” tax cuts, because tax cuts aren’t spending.
As for SS, you do realize there is a cap because benefits are capped, right? Eliminating the cap doesn’t even fix SS.
Am I a one trick pony? Maybe. But my trick hasn’t been tried in a long time. But the last time it was tried, it resulted in a budget surplus, not a deficit.
My ideas involve respecting the rights of people. Coming those rights is the right to keep your own money.
Big_Wave9732 | 23 hours ago
And? 2022 was an outlier year for tax collections based on disruptions and delayed consumption from the Covid years. You're seriously suggesting that one data point justifies additional tax cuts?
That's absurd.
Eliminating the SS wage cap removes about 75 percent of the financial shortage. Means testing new beneficiaries up to 400 percent federal poverty level removes the rest with a surplus.
Your trick is austerity. Austerity brings recessions, it does not ensure prosperity.
>My ideas involve respecting the rights of people. Coming those rights is the right to keep your own money.
Yes yes, we were all neck beard Libertarians in college. Then we got responsibilities and grew out of it.
hczimmx4 | 22 hours ago
Was 2000 America austerity?
And every single year revenue exceeded 18% of GDP was an outlier. Spending should be 17-17.5% of GDP, the long term revenue average.
Your ideas for SS fundamentally change SS from an earned benefit to just another welfare program, and one people would rather opt out of if given the option.
Believing people have rights is a “neck-beard Libertarian” idea? The belief in government protecting the rights of people is the very foundation of liberal democracy.
Big_Wave9732 | 22 hours ago
The policy of deep cuts with no revenue increases that you keep going on about here and now are an austerity position. You're being intentionally obtuse here.
Making the changes I propose keeps SS tied to its roots as a paid for wage program. Means testing is also a throwback to the original, difference being back then it was means tested with a higher retirement age to collect instead. Same principal at work.
What I've suggest is also more practical than the handful of nothing you've proposed thus far. Oh I'm sorry, you said to cut old people's benefits. And you wonder I say you're espousing neckbeard Libertarian ideas lol.
you2234 | a day ago
Entitlements are a blip. They need reform but is a tiny speck. Defense spending and corp taxes are the biggest opportunities to make meaningful impacts.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
SS, Medicare and interest on debt are all bigger outlays than defense. Defense can, and should be cut. But to pretend nothing else should be cut is burying your head in the sand.
Corporate taxes are a cost. Same as a tariff. Consumers pay them.
ReasonableWait5175 | a day ago
Unless they are coupled with penalties to prevent costs being passed to the consumer. The wealth to fix this needs to come from corporations first, the 1% second, and then a gradient of the top 20% thereafter. Not eating from the plates of those already getting the short end of the inequality stick.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
That’s a good way to hamper commerce.
And there isn’t enough wealth to take. Spending needs cut.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
Also, you want to shift even more of a burden on the very people who already bear the largest burden. How about we make the tax burden more equitable? Equitability is the goal now. Let’s do that.
Big_Wave9732 | a day ago
Going to cuts while ignoring the revenue side is putting *your* head in the sand.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
Revenue is remarkably stable over time. If spending had stayed at the levels it was at in 2000(17.5% of GDP), there would have been a surplus as recently as 2022. However, I would be willing to revert to the 2000 tax rates if spending goes back to that level as well.
Big_Wave9732 | 23 hours ago
Precisely, we'd have a balanced budget and sustainable spending. Going back almost 50 years the U.S. has never cut spending in proportion to tax cuts. Given this history it is not a reasonable ask or expectation now.
Meanwhile the population of the U.S. has grown by sixty million people from 2000 to 2025. The country has grown and required outlays have grown with it.
Austerity by itself doesn't work. And will not work. Especially if the U.S. is to continue being the reserve currency. In order to balance the budget there simply must be tax increases of some sort.
p_pio | a day ago
Not really. Second highest spending category is interest. Increase revenue without increasing spending and treasuries should be considered as safer asset.
So increased revenue could lower spending without cutting entitlements.
MANEWMA | a day ago
Was considered a safe asset.. now conservatives and maga have made it a risky bet. And negative population growth makes it even worse bet.
Following the British path to becoming a weak country...
hczimmx4 | a day ago
>So increased revenue could lower spending without cutting entitlements.
This statement doesn’t make any sense.
What is the highest spending category? To increase revenue, taxes would need to be increased. On everyone. However, in the past, everyone did pay higher rates, and revenue was comparable to now.
p_pio | a day ago
Interest is around 15% of the spending while social security at 22%. It's for FY2026 so since October, but I checked on wayback and in FY2025 it was 14% and 22%.
shmu | a day ago
Cut something, sure, but entitlements, or defense spending. Or ICE's massive budget bump?
hczimmx4 | a day ago
All of them.
Fly_Rodder | a day ago
and raise taxes.
hczimmx4 | a day ago
Not a fan of tax increases. People have rights. One of those rights is to keep your own property
stickylava | 19 hours ago
Works until the people with burning pitchforks show up.
Fly_Rodder | a day ago
Why are both sides in agreement that racking up trillions in new debt is better than just spending within our means?
Governments aren't households. They can use debt to manage their economies and there are economic theories that government debt like modern monetary theory is needed to spend currency into existence. Ultimately though, there are two ways governments can spend debt: infrastructure and support to people or tax cuts to the wealthy. And tax cuts without spending reductions IS essentially spending currency into existence and giving it to the wealthy.
The GOP has been fear mongering about the debt for 40 years. One democratic president combined with a GOP congress balanced the budget spending cuts and increased taxes. And the GOP said, no, we didn't mean that way and made tax cuts their primary focus. You'll notice that the GOP complains about spending and debt until they're in power and then it's all about tax cuts first and foremost.
tenuousemphasis | 17 hours ago
MMT relies on the fantasy that growth can go on forever. If you think it can then you do not have a basic grasp on exponential growth.
finvest | a day ago
> Call me ignorant, but I just can't understand why we cant balance the budget, ever?
Once upon a time, a man named Bill Clinton...
But yeah, ever since then we've spent like drunken sailors.
Tribe303 | 23 hours ago
Yeah. You Americans litteraly chose Trump, over the wife of the only guy in my 50+ year life to have balanced the US budget. 🤦
finvest | 22 hours ago
Hillary?! Can you imagine if we had elected someone who had such egregious disrespect for the norms of the presidency and the laws of the country such as to run a private email server?!
We would have descended into anarchy.
Tribe303 | 22 hours ago
Pure chaos I say! Women are too emotionally unstable to run a country.
SirTiffAlot | a day ago
You're not crazy, there are a lot of people who do want to balance the budget, they aren't running the country or dictating policy though.
The ideology seems to be we can incur as much debt as we want, nobody is going to call us on it because our debt allows us to strong arm them into never trying.
DrTreeMan | a day ago
Clinton had a small budget surplus and the response of Republicans under GW Bush was that if the budget had a surplus then the government is collecting too much tax revenue and taxes should be cut. Forget the fact that we had trillions in debt to still pay back.
Republicans talk a lot of talk but have zero interest in balancing the budget.
PipsqueakPilot | a day ago
Yup. They have absolute control of the government right now. And the result is an absolutely exploding deficit.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
That was our opportunity to correct course and Bush absolutely screwed the pooch.
We came within literally one vote from passing a balanced budget amendment.
nukem996 | a day ago
Congress always increases the military budget. The military is the largest social program which includes thousands of military contractors. This is incredibly inefficient and wastes billions every year from contractors that over charge and under deliver to billions spend on things we do not need. Medical is our second largest spend however we have a for profit health care system which encourages overcharging. This is supported by an insurance industry whose sole purpose is to profit on medical billing.
If we want to get spending under control we have to admit that vast parts of our society are inefficient and needlessly wasteful. We need to transform these systems into a need based system where the profit motive is outlawed. But we can't do that due to an irrational fear of socialism.
handsoapdispenser | a day ago
Military spending per GDP was close to all-time lows before Trump.
nukem996 | a day ago
It's not about percentage of GDP. We waste billions every year on crap we don't need or ever use. There are fields of unused airplanes and tanks why? We allow lobbists to tell Congress what to buy for the military and ignore military leaders when they say it's unnecessary. Military spending needs to be vastly cut.
darryl__fish | a day ago
it's absolutely baout percentage of GDP as far as bondholders are concerned, which is the subject of this thread in r/economics, not your personal moral vision for the country.
morbie5 | a day ago
> we have a for profit health care system which encourages overcharging
Most hospitals in the US are non profit, it is more complicated than just profit motives by shareholders or owners
nukem996 | a day ago
Even if the hospital is non-profit the drug companies, medical device companies, medical supply companies, food services, insurance, and even ambulance companies are all for profit. We need to completely get rid of the profit motive everywhere in military, healthcare, and education.
korben2600 | a day ago
And the physicians groups they contract with? How many Americans have been told their hospital is "in network" only to be told the doctor is not and receive extra bills from "out of network" physicians, radiologists, surgeons, compounding pharmacies, etc? The system is designed to be opaque while extracting as much profit as possible from captive patients.
rollem | a day ago
I think it’s the same basic logic as to why households like credit cards. Politically there are strong incentives to both spend money and to cut taxes, whereas there are strong penalties for the opposite. The consequences of these actions have not been felt by any US politician, ever. Until the costs politically are higher than the alternatives, we won’t do anything. I suspect that some semblance of a debt crisis will need to occur for the US to fix its budget issues.
unfunnysexface | a day ago
The smoking hasn't killed me yet
DorphinPack | a day ago
The Pentagon has never passed an audit.
Several-Action-4043 | a day ago
Gotta pay for the stargate program somehow.
jcb193 | a day ago
For the same reason your neighbor finds buying a new car sexier than paying off their credit card debt.
Nobody wins elections on “being responsible.”
The Republicans have weaponized this sentiment very well to rack up a ton of debt while in office and then blame the bills on democrats when not.
wirebear | a day ago
Usually, least everything I have read, democrats do try to take the deficeit. Clinton I believe took it to 0. Not positive but at least out of negatives. Obama also decreased the deficit under bush jr.
As I understand it trump skyrocketed the deficient by cutting taxes and increasing spending.
Biden is a weird one cause he took control during a disaster and his deficient impact was mixed. Partially because he couldn't get the Republicans to cooperate on anything financial.
And trump has one more jumped it and tried to cut taxes more.
So for my entire lifetime, it's been democrats trying to take control over Republican spending and tax cuts. But raising taxes is incredibly unpopular and will likely lose you the next election. Particularly in cases like bidens top bracket tax. The propoganda machine just says "raising taxes" not how it wouldn't impact almost anyone but the top 1%
braumbles | a day ago
Republicans have never been the party of fiscal responsibility. Go look at the deficit under every Republican of the last 50 years. Every time they're in office they blow up the debt, then Democrats come in to stabilize it, rinse repeat. Much like the economy, Republicans fuck everything up and Democrats are asked to fix it, then are rewarded by having voters elect another Republican to fuck it all up again.
Trump, GW, Bush, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, the same bullshit cycle after cycle.
frigginjensen | a day ago
We had a balanced budget from 1998-2001, during the Clinton administration. What’s even more shocking is that Republicans controlled Congress during that time.
We could do it again but probably not in this hyper-partisan era.
tapwater86 | a day ago
If you’re a politician there are only two ways to balance the budget
You can call to increase revenue via increasing taxes. You’ll lose massive amounts of donations and have the wealthy push your opponent
You can call to cut services. You’ll piss off the masses but also at this point what’s even left to cut? You’ll also lose any primary to any person claiming they want to restore social services.
IAmNotARacoon | a day ago
The US isn't the only country with debt. To me it feels like at least a partial result of democracy. Campaigning on austerity is a losing strategy, and governments only need a plan for the next election cycle. So while we might all agree that having government debt is bad, having a government actually fix it is kind of political suicide.
GWsublime | 23 hours ago
Government debt is not an inherently bad thing
Prestigious_Load1699 | 18 hours ago
Until you have racked up so much debt that interest obligations become burdensome and crowd out the ability to borrow more to pass stimulus.
Random aside - debt servicing outpaced our entire defense budget in 2025.
ActuallyIsDavid | a day ago
Because the incentives for politicians are exactly backwards. Voters reward politicians for doing things that increase the deficit (lowering taxes, increasing social benefits) and punish them for doing the opposite, “responsible” things: increasing taxes or decreasing benefits.
BadmiralHarryKim | a day ago
I believe it's called the Two Santas theory. Democrats are the Santa who wants to increase spending while Republicans are the Santa who wants to cut taxes.
MANEWMA | a day ago
They think growth via tax cuts will grow quicker than the debt...
But they didn't plan on America no longer being the global currency. They didn't plan on negative population growth.
This model is now broke and America will be unable to afford shoes soon let alone a military.
JupiterMiningCorpTec | a day ago
"They think growth via tax cuts will grow quicker than the debt..."
They don't think that. They just said it to get gullible Fox News watchers to vote for them.
angel_announcer | a day ago
>Is there some super secret way we are going to get out of paying our debts?
Debasement/inflation.
CountessOfCheese | a day ago
It seems there are no repercussions for kicking the can down the road and making it someone else’s problem. (For now.)
a_library_socialist | a day ago
For one reason, because GDP = C + G + I + NX
You cut G, you're going to see GDP drop. Which means you're going straight into a recession, and nobody wants to own that.
MikuEmpowered | a day ago
It's not that US is spending extra money.
It's that the previous expense are also subjected to inflation. And as more and more people are parking their investment in things like ETF and Crypto, you can't tax that until they cash out.
This means the US revenue more or less is stagnant, but the need for things like social security increases as population increases. And with infrastructure aging, you also need more maintenance.
This is why the economy NEEDS to keep growing, and why "growth slowed down" is a really bad sign. It won't affect us in the short term, but 2 decades out. It will all hit at the same time.
A common misconcept about defence is that US is pissing away all that money. This is false. The defence budget is both maintenance AND personnel, US military IS a giant part of the local economy. Some towns are practically proper up by local members' spending. Only 17% is actually spent on r&d, or "military complex".
This is why the talking point is fking moot, because things like "this program cost trillions", that trillion is spread across the years, and include not just the frame, but maintenance and supplies. The later which provides jobs across sectors. It's same as "tax the rich". It's not the same as traditional sense that you can just apply a direct cut into.
"Just axe some program" is a easy notion, except you still need that capability, and canceling existing contract creates fines that sometimes outright exceeds the savings. Don't get me wrong, there are waste in the process, but to find the waste require colossal accounting effort.
"Just socialize everything" is a great notion, until you start the first step. I can tell you from first hand experience, trying to simply digitalized and catalogue your local town hall history record ACCURATELY will take mine boggling amount of time. it's not a simple "let's just slap it on" that can solve the issue.
That being said, US isn't even willing to take the first step, so this is more or less fantasy.
GWsublime | 23 hours ago
So there's really only 2 ways to balance a budget and they are both difficult. First, you can cut spending. Problem with cutting spending in the US especially (but also in general) is that governments are not corporations. For every dollar you cut your lose some amount of revenue both directly (who ever you were paying that dollar to is bo longer making that dollar and so 8s no longer being taxed on making it) and indirectly (most spending programs generate some amount of value on top of the people they employ. UsAID, for example, bought up surplus stocks of food that offered security to farmers. Losing USAID dollars may result in bankruptcy for a farmer meaning you lose both the tax on the amount you were spending and the tax on all the farmers other sales. Also bad, food costs go up and people starting spending less. You can minimize damage if you're careful where you cut (see Clinton) and if you wait for a period of higher than desirable inflation but there's always some damage done and, frankly, the US doesn't really have many excessive spending programs left.
Second, you can raise taxes. That can mean direct increases in income tax or the addition of more tax brackets or eliminating the cap on social security or closing loopholes and tax breaks that allow corporations to pay significantly less than they otherwise would or some combinationof the above, jr all of the above. Problem is, thats wildly unpopular. A massive portion of the US has been trained to believe that taxes are evil and increasing them is the worst possible thing. Everyone wants more of their "hard earned money" ignoring that thats an incredibly short sighted view.
It leaves no good options for a politician who wants to keep being a politician and most do want that in the same way that most people want to keep their jobs.
What you can do, however, is lean on inflation. Inflation effectively increases the tax rate while also looking like you're not cutting spending. Oh, sure, the spending dollars won't go as far and servoce woll get worse but, if you're on the right politically, thats an added win for you as you point to poor service as a reason to privatize or climate services. Even better for Conservatives inflation is a regressive tax in that it overly punishes the poor while leaving the wealthy relatively untouched without most right wing voters understanding that. Inflation won't work indefinitely but with the petrodollar and US hegemony, it can last a remarkably long time. Of course Trump is in the process of killing the shit out of that but well see.
President_Camacho | 18 hours ago
Under Democratic administrations, the budget picture improves substantially. Saying that we can't balance the budget ever isn't correct. Believing that supports the Republican philosophy that government is ineffective except for the military.
Curun | 16 hours ago
Look at the boards of grummen, l3, honeywell, lockheed. Board headshots are all public
Its a financial circle jerk with them and politicians of both sides R and D
None of them will slash military industrial complex spending
ringobob | a day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
AreaPrudent7191 | a day ago
Because voters are impossible to please, and they force every elected rep to kick the can down the road. Everyone wants the government to spend more carefully, but what they really mean is "don't touch that thing that affects me, you should spend more on that. Cut those programs I don't like or use". Except that for every dollar you want to cut, there's a voter screaming that you cannot cut that dollar.
Then you get "small government" republicans playing budget chicken. They are quick to cut taxes, usually heavily favouring the rich, without replacing the revenue. They usually try to cut some high profile programs that are popular among democrats, but rarely do they actually bring spending down. They also spend like drunken sailors and don't give a shit about the debt or deficit until they are out of office, then they lose their fucking minds. Yet somehow they have such effective marketing that they're able to paint democrats as the fiscally irresponsible ones.
Businesses love this because a lot of the republican freebees come their way - though to be fair lots of democrats get in on this too. That's why healthcare will never be fixed - both sides get too much money from the insurance companies to ever consider single-payer.
Democrats are stuck - they want to build and improve but are usually left with such a disaster after a republican administration that their choice is to be frugal and responsible (Clinton balanced the budget) or spend and just don't worry about it (Obama, Biden) because the opposition will freak out no matter what they do.
There's just no real incentive for either side to control spending.
What is really needed is someone who tell voters the truth - that you can't have whatever you want without increased taxes and making the wealthy pay their share. But voters hate politicians who tell the truth, that's why they never win. Democracy is simply an expression of human nature and the preference of comforting lies over uncomfortable truth.
JupiterMiningCorpTec | a day ago
The problem isn't that voters are impossible to please. The problem is that voters are lied to. They are told that cutting taxes will actually lower the debt. They are told that people in other countries will pay the tariffs. They are told that Social Security is paying billions to dead people. They are told that Mexico will pay for walls.
The first step in solving a lot of problems is stopping the tsunami of misinformation.
boringexplanation | a day ago
Look up the most common narratives on Reddit, and even this sub. The common layman think it’s the military spending (800B) and not social spending (2.6T) that is bankrupting the country.
So called college educated people can’t even read a budget to see where the most realistic cuts are.
Edit: We get the politicians that reflect our collective financial knowledge. We can have zero military spending and you numbskulls will still get angry that we have to cut social spending. Medicare is a socialized system- can’t blame the private system on that.
Alone_Hunt1621 | a day ago
I had a coworker tell me our foreign policy was great and that those actions in Venezuela and the threats toward Greenland were I portent because “America was going broke”.
So I said the rich could pay more taxes. To which he replied I was against the rich and didn’t want them to exist. I can tell you that’s not true. But it was a weird conversation.
1-760-706-7425 | a day ago
> he replied I was against the rich and didn’t want them to exist. I can tell you that’s not true.
Even if it was, so what? Nothing wrong with advocating for a more equitable society.
morbie5 | a day ago
> and that those actions in Venezuela and the threats toward Greenland were I portent because “America was going broke”.
This person thinks the exploitation of Venezuela and Greenland are going to balance the federal budget? plz tell me who his dealer is so I can try what he is on
JupiterMiningCorpTec | a day ago
His dealer is sitting in the Oval Office right now.
1-760-706-7425 | a day ago
> plz tell me who his dealer is so I can try what he is on
Probably Adam Smith and his drug of capitalism.
Alone_Hunt1621 | a day ago
The Heritage Foundation. He’d never even heard of them.
a_library_socialist | a day ago
I mean, why isn't it true?
Alone_Hunt1621 | a day ago
I just meant personally speaking I’m not against the existence of the rich but I do believe that the higher tax brackets need to pay a higher rate. It’s not all or nothing so the choice wasn’t even real.
I mean can’t there be rich people without having so many poor?
a_library_socialist | 16 hours ago
Under capitalism, no. You need the poor for coercion.
maikuxblade | 15 hours ago
If everything that inconveniences the rich betrays a feeling of "hating" them, then what do we call how they feel about the poor as they actively rob us blind?
Humble-Plankton2217 | a day ago
One side of the aisle continuously accuses the other of raising taxes and spending too much. The other side of the aisle spends just as much, if not more, but they borrow it to spend it.
I know the economics of a huge government is not straightforward, however it is a fact that borrowing to spend and then paying interest on what you borrowed is never the better deal.
You can't always apply household economics to government economics, but sometimes you should. Maxing out the credit card on shopping binges is wildly irresponsible and wholly typical of the GOP.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 17 hours ago
Government and household economics are the same in the basic sense that borrowing comes at a cost - future interest obligations.
There is no free lunch.
Xeynon | 22 hours ago
It wasn't the national debt that caused the bond markets to freak out, it was Trump (whom Griffin supports) engaging in moronic saber rattling against allies.
Griffin is an idiot, a liar, or both.
already-redacted | a day ago
> “If U.S. Treasuries are viewed as being at risk because the United States is not seen as creditworthy, then bonds and stocks will move together in price. That will result in bonds having a much higher demand yield in the marketplace, so mortgage rates will be higher; the cost for us to finance our deficits will be higher,” Griffin said.
If only there’s a way to make revenue by the US government someway that was progressive and tied to income or wealth… maybe we should cut that and do regressive fees for service /s
silverum | a day ago
It's worked the hundreds of other times we've tried and the deficits magically went away entirely after every other example, so I think you're right, best we try it again. After all, it works!
BadmiralHarryKim | a day ago
A rising tide drowns everyone who can't afford a boat anymore.
silverum | a day ago
Yeah, that's the goal. Drown the plebs and useless eaters because tech bros and oligarchs in board rooms are what actually make the world work. And in the minds of those oligarchs and tech bros, robotics and automation (which they think will be controlled by said oligarchs and tech bros) will do all the actual work.
Big_Wave9732 | a day ago
Well, glad part of my investments are in bond funds then! Time to capitalize on the end of the world.
geneticdeadender | a day ago
That was in 23.
It is already too late. We had a chance in the 90s with tge Clinton plan but no politician will propose austerity now.
They all kick the can down the road.
Cheap_Warning_ | 17 hours ago
Kicking the can down the road would be an improvement, instead they are cutting more taxes for the rich and are increasing the deficit with more spending.
Curun | 16 hours ago
400,000? Federal employees laid off….
TANF Food stamps gutted because “welfare queens” and racism….
More of that is not going to fix anything… wtf. Its only going to kill and drive people away.
Look to Mamdani if you aren't too racist, deliver new services, government needs to help and win back trust.
My mother worked for a federal office then the local dfacs(sp?) Watched her deal with the rot in the 90s.
Clintons are a large part of why dems lost so many… radicalized people. Theres no turning them back around, I've tried
eulersidentification | 14 hours ago
Austerity hasn't worked anywhere. Every country that did it is worse off, because it was about cuts to social programs, infrastructure, schools, health, etc. to fund tax breaks for the rich.
It is literally a way to funnel money from the poor to the rich.
We have an inflation problem. There is too much money in the economy. But the lower and middle classes don't have any of it. You can't solve the inflation by taking money exclusively from people who don't have it. Fixing the inflation problem necessarily requires taking money out from large concentrations of money. ie. The rich and massive businesses.
[Deleted] | 17 hours ago
Should we even file taxes (2024-2025) when our own politicians are corrupted as hell!! Nah man I’m tired of this crap! “Ooo you still owe 4 thousand dollars after the 50 thousand dollars you’ve contributed to taxes this year, thank you for your time “
ARE WE KIDDING OURSELVES?!? Oh wait, but I’ll be imprisoned if I don’t pay my taxes, but our president’s millionaire/billionaire buddies, and himself go on terrorizing the world !? Come yall! Wake up!
eosisoe | 16 hours ago
It only works if we all all together don't pay our taxes one year. But then I reckon that year after is gonna look pretty damn Ugly. Gotta start somewhere though.
[Deleted] | 16 hours ago
I’m a 90s kid, I grew up listening to our musical radicals here in the U.S.: S.O.A.D, RATM & others. When I listen to their songs now… I’m baffled. Their lyrics are exactly what we are seeing today.. relative to decades ago! I agree with you, we have to start somewhere…
goblintacos | a day ago
What warning? I used to believe the national debt was a real problem. Now I'm not even so sure because the numbers it reaches it really starts to get absurd. Like really absurd. We all agree how absurd it looks.
Yet nothing ever happens. Why does nothing happen if it's that existential? I guess you can say it hasn't happened yet... But that doesn't seem all that helpful.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 17 hours ago
Of course it matters - interest payments exceeded $1 trillion in 2025.
Do you think continuous borrowing doesn’t come at a cost that will eventually cripple us?
towwwerclub | a day ago
Because we close our eyes and print $$$. Ponzi scheme. Our debt is mostly owed to ourselves.
JRSSR | a day ago
Deficits don't matter... Just ask Dick Cheney.
Old_Value_9157 | a day ago
Dick Cheney‘s corpse.
TwopennyQuasar | a day ago
Best the GOP can do is gut Social Security and Medicare while adding more tax cuts for billionaires to add another $10 trillion to the debt over the next five years.
rogozh1n | a day ago
The national debt is a transfer of wealth to contemporary billionaires from future generations. It makes no sense.
Social services and immigrants are not the cause of the deficits, no matter what we are told.
I think the trump administration sees their effect on the debt to be a part of destroying what America stands for, similar to attacking NATO and Minneapolis.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 17 hours ago
If we can include Medicare under the umbrella of social services, then you are abjectly incorrect.
Medicare alone added $498 billion to the deficit in 2024.
Plastic-Helicopter45 | a day ago
Well a certain someone has been responsible for 25% of America’s debt piling 10T on the deficit (so far) in 5 years of presidency. And they claim they are the party of fiscal responsibility and economics…. Just better at messaging since this ain’t true imo
Quintzy_ | 23 hours ago
Wrong. Republicans currently control the government, so politicians and the media are back to not giving a shit about the national debt.
We have to wait for a Democratic President (if that's allowed to ever happen again) for it to be time to get the national debt in order.
QFGTrialByFire | 22 hours ago
No need for explicit warning - just look at the gold price. XAU is up 164% over 5 years and the stock market only around 80%. Its death by a thousand cuts over time to the value of the USD.
The biggest part of that debt is all that QE still floating around from the fed. People pretend its the governments budget but that's small potatoes to that QE debt still out there. Tell the fed to actually do its QT.
Fed balance sheet shows they are still around $2.4Trillion out there more than before covid. The annual deficit of the government is around $1.7Trillion. But its the taxpayers who have to tighten their belt first not the banks and ceos of those banks that still have that $2.4Trillion of welfare? How about we start with the banks QE welfare first.
NobodysFavorite | 20 hours ago
Bond rates are an expression of risk vs confidence. Doing stupid things like erratic unhinged decisions to threaten allies for no good reason whatsoever undermines confidence and raises the pricing of risk.
PlutoJones42 | 20 hours ago
After pillaging America for all it’s worth for years, now Ken Griffin wants to make moves that would benefit the country?
The only reason they are saying this is because if the dollar goes tits up, so does their comp.
kaplanfx | 19 hours ago
There’s no reason the rule has to apply to everyone that owns the asset class. We have progressive taxation and progressive and regressive benefits all over the system.
sheba716 | a day ago
Republicans will try to solve the debt crisis by cutting the programs that help the most vulnerable citizens rather than raise taxes on the wealthiest who can afford to pay them.
JRSSR | a day ago
Both will likely be necessary... Or a major war.
korben2600 | a day ago
The richest country in modern history has managed to convince the plebs we're on the edge of bankruptcy and that's why we can't have healthcare. Meanwhile: more billionaire tax cuts! double the Pentagon budget!
OddlyFactual1512 | a day ago
Halving the $839B defense budget would be a great start. The fact that the DOD can't audit its spending should be enough for anyone to realize it's by far the biggest area of waste, fraud, and abuse. Every other nation could do the same thing DOD does, but with 1/3 the budget. Why? They properly account for their spending and identify waste, fraud, and abuse.
ironteddybear | a day ago
To everyone saying, “what about taxing the rich?”
Yes, but the debt is 1/3 a taxes problem and 2/3 a reckless spending problem.
Deficits are persistent over the last 50 years, with the exception of some responsible management during the Clinton admin. The long tail of deficits exceeding 4% following the 2008 recession and COVID are very concerning.
Taxes seem to max out around 19% of GDP, and typically average around 17%.
Spending has consistently exceeded 20% of GDP in the last 15 years and is growing. Clinton admin got the budget under control, largely by cutting spending way below 20%.
It would be very hard to get taxes close to 20% of GDP since that would be an all time high (at least as far back as the FRED data goes, 1929). What needs to happen to get deficits below 3% of GDP is a reduction in spending.
To everyone saying, “okay, cut the military budget,” the military budget has been declining as a percentage of GDP over that last 50 years.
The largest growing expenses are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt. The fact of the matter is that we need to make hard cuts here.
One obvious one is we need to lift the age of eligibility for social security. We haven’t raised the age since 1983, and that was only from 65 to 67. The life expectancy in 1930s when social security was created was about 60 for men and 63 for women. Today it is between 76-78 years old. Yes, the numbers are bit skewed by reductions in infant mortality, but the age still needs to be raised by more than just 2 years. It was originally supposed to an insurance program in case you lived too long.
The number of people paying into social security per SS recipient has declined from 5.1 workers/recipient in 1960 to 2.7 workers/recipient in 2024.
DrewHaef | 21 hours ago
Then why not do all of those things together? Why does it always have to be, “It’s not that simple. So let’s just not even consider that”?
They cut programs that barely make a dent in our total spending, and the taxing the rich part never comes to fruition.
Cutting spending and deregulation isn’t enough on its own either. But republicans never want to admit that. They just wait for a democrat to take over again and raise taxes because they know that gets more negative press than spending cuts and deregulation. Then back to the campaign trail to lambast the democrats for “taxing Americans to death.” Then they take back power, cut the taxes back again and we go through this all cycle all over again.
ironteddybear | 21 hours ago
Yes, you need to do both, but taxes only gets you 1/3 of the way there and the remaining 2/3 has to come from spending reductions. People on Reddit love to harp on taxing the rich, but never want to entertain the bigger part of the problem, which is record high levels of spending.
RotundCorgi | a day ago
So, the thing about raising the eligibilty age of social security is that it is not just a number. It's, you know, age. There is an upper threshold to where that number can realistically go that makes sense. And by makes sense, I mean: 1) upholding the ideals and promise of social security, where folks don't have to work to the age of borderline decrepitness to draw it, and 2) providing enough incentive to the American workforce that they want to contribute and not buck the system. Who the hell wants to be told "You've paid in to social security all your life in the greatest, richest nation in history, but you still need to hang in there a bit longer because, boy, we couldn't solve military expenditures or progressive taxes. So please work until you are 70."
Edit: Also, you stated social security was intended to be insurance "in case you lived too long". GTFO with that. The intent was never for Americans to work until we literally drop dead, but here's a little cash if you beat the odds. It was explicitly intended for the opposite: to foster the bottom rung and budding middle-class into an era where they could retire with some degree of dignity, which was largely a luxury not afforded to the working class before.
ironteddybear | 22 hours ago
It is an insurance program that collects annual premiums and then pays out if you become disabled, old, or your wage earning spouse dies. In other words, get paid if you are too old to support yourself.
People live much longer now than they did in the 1930s, and many are capable of working longer.
Also, progressive taxation and military spending are missing the bigger picture. The government is spending more money than ever on benefits for the elderly, and none of these benefits were funded appropriately with taxes, but instead funded with debt, i.e. future young people’s taxes.
Re: payments if you live too long: Maybe that wasn’t the stated intent, but with life expectancy at 60 and the retirement age 65 it was certainly programmed that way and was sustainable that way.
The numbers don’t math out when life expectancy is 76-78, retirement is 67, and the ratio of working people to retired people is cut in half.
Lastly, the government breaks promises all the time. That’s why we shouldn’t be advocating for a bigger government. It is already spending a record level percentage of our GDP, from the last 50 years.
Social security is already on track to cut benefits by 23% in 2033.
wagdog84 | a day ago
I think this is why the scotus tariff ruling hasn’t happened. It could potentially bankrupt the USA, à la Greece. Maybe that’s what Trump wants, China, Japan and UK own large portions of their debt and collect interest payments from USA.
LoFi_Funk | a day ago
This regime doesn’t give a shit. They’re stealing as much as they can before the walls collapse in because they ripped the copper out of the walls.
mkt853 | a day ago
I agree. The regime and its inner circle are going to siphon as much as they can before they peace out to their private islands and bunkers leaving a populace to deal with Africa levels of poverty and fighting over table scraps.
PeterVanNostrand | a day ago
Trump tweet incoming: DONT LISTEN TO KEN GRIFFEN. He is a terrible baseball player from the war zone of Cincinnati. I was a much better player than him and his son Ken Griffen Jr. Bad players, bad economists. I’m a better economist with better genes. Wharton.
garitone | a day ago
Don't worry. The Republicans will scream bloody murder about spending the next time Democrats are in power. Until then, though, they'll spend like drunken sailors.
Caitliente | 22 hours ago
I have an idea! Let’s tax the ultra wealthy go non existence. We can make up the rest by locking up those perpetrating violence against our neighbors and charging to chuck tomatoes at them.
Richandler | 16 hours ago
Fuck the bond market. Why the hell are they dictating anything? It's long past time to tell the bond vigilantes, like every other country on the planet has already done, to fuck off.
Kari-kateora | 11 hours ago
Boy I bet you said the same thing about Greece in 2014
RaidSmolive | 13 hours ago
trump wants to ruin america, its economy and its people.
stop acting like that isnt a fundamental truth. if the bond market wants the debt fixed, they better start looking for johns and lees
gurniehalek | a day ago
In order to address our fiscal issues, we will need to raise taxes. Period. End of story.
Lower income folks cannot be exempt from taxes. Most western industrial countries do not exempt the poor and have them pay at least some taxes.
We probably need a VAT. Won’t be popular either but it does increase revenues.
Taxes in the middle and upper classes will likely also need to rise.
Get rid of the maximum contributions to fica.
As for our existing entitlement programs, they need reform. Living longer means raising the bar for collection. Increases in age requirements for both Medicare and social security are a must. Move them to 70 since we live to 80. Mitigating spending should help curb the deficit
These will not be popular. But the GOP is already there so implement them.
PipsqueakPilot | a day ago
Payroll taxes are paid by everyone- and those programs make up the majority of government spending. Even people who pay 'no federal income taxes' are still paying a 15.3% payroll tax (Because the 'employer portion' is absolutely taken into account when it comes to total employee costs) as a baseline.
So when you say they shouldn't be exempt from taxes, do you mean to say, "The tax baseline of 15.3% is too low and needs to be raised."?
modestpushbroom | a day ago
Noticed how you taxed more the bottom and middle, but not the upper class. Interesting they are left out of your “raise taxes” rhetoric.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 17 hours ago
“Taxes will likely need to rise on the middle and upper classes.
Get rid of the maximum contribution to FICA.”
Don’t falsely demonize the reasonable person in the room.
modestpushbroom | 5 hours ago
No i will do just that for the reasons i pointed out.
“Taxes will likely need to rise on the middle and upper classes”. As if that’s the last resort or a consequences for the “lower class” not being able to take the burden of taxation.
A better way to say this would be “taxes would need to be raised for everyone”.
Instead it was a sentence on how “we would likely need to do it”.
RotundCorgi | 23 hours ago
Lower income folks are not exempt from taxes currently, so it's weird you phrased it as if they are. Like, what are you even alluding to by wording it that way?
korben2600 | a day ago
We already have a stealth VAT now. We enacted tariffs averaging 22% of all US imports.
Republicans managed to get the working class to help subsidize more billionaire tax cuts. It's kinda genius.
Funny_Season6113 | a day ago
I agree with Ken Griffin. It will have to start with removing social welfare programs and seizing all wealth over 1 billion. Oh you can’t leave the country. Otherwise you will be in jail for treason.
cbarrister | a day ago
Nah, Trump will just line his pockets and his inner circles for the next 3 years with skyrocketing obscene debt, and then when the chickens come home to roost, he will just blame Biden/Obama/Whoever. He's never taken personal responsibilities for his mistakes and never will. The nation will be cleaning up his messes for decades after he is gone.
mary02russo | a day ago
With a never predictable child guiding the USA, who likely forewarns his financial bros about his announcements so they can position themselves for windfalls as he waffles/'does a deal', the common folks with their 401/403 are the big losers. With the 5% threshold met on bond markets, no one dare retire because there is no (even hedged) guarantee that their money will be there. I've lived through three major market devaluations because of bubbles, and I am still working into my seventh decade because not even straight-up savings and bonds are stable. Maybe after the Republicans regain their cognitive powers and courage and the Democrats actually field strong, likable, electable national candidates, might I finally leave the workforce.
CryptoMemesLOL | a day ago
TAXES TAXES TAXES
>Rutger Bregman saying the real issue that needs tackling is tax avoidance. 'We can invite Bono once more but come on we've got to be talking about taxes ... all the rest is bullshit in my opinion,'
Prestigious_Load1699 | 17 hours ago
Tax avoidance is nothing more than strategically using the legal tax system to minimize one’s tax burden.
What you would need is broad reform of the tax code to achieve anything.
CryptoMemesLOL | 10 hours ago
What do you think we're talking about loll duh
cl1518 | 22 hours ago
You’re right that would be intuitive if we’re talking about the dollar amounts, but we are talking about tax burden relative to other income brackets. This is the crux of the article - the income of the top 1% of earners grew faster than other income brackets, while the tax burden did not grow as much.
The article specifically calls out that a significant portion of the increase in income amongst the top 1% of earners is from realized capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate than payroll.