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U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#31

Post by qeternity »

frogperson wrote: post #28
rhelz wrote: post #3

By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground. I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.

Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat. America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.

It is still people, not money, who votes for them over and over again…

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#32

Post by qzx_pierri »

rhelz wrote: post #29
pstuart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports. That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.

The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees." When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you…

[flagged]

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#33

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

0xy wrote: post #24
rhelz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different. But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom. No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.

There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?

The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans.

If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.

But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.

There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.

Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#34

Post by oth001 »

qeternity wrote: post #31
frogperson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat. America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.

It is still people, not money, who votes for them over and over again…

Well when the choice is between two corrupt and/or bribed politicians...

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#35

Post by jghn »

0xy wrote: post #27
jghn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct yet also obscures an important point. The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true. I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one wh…

The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.

I don't believe I said otherwise. And yet, your response doesn't at all touch on my other point.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#36

Post by solid_fuel »

0xy wrote: post #27
jghn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct yet also obscures an important point. The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true. I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one wh…

The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.

You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy.

This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#38

Post by _djo_ »

pstuart wrote: post #20
exabrial wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible. The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing…

I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports. That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.

The Democrats have, in the past forty years, been the only party to have consistently been able to reduce the deficit, even creating a surplus by the end of Clinton's presidency.

They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]

Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.

This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.

The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/ls1088

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#39

Post by solid_fuel »

bamboozled wrote: post #37

This admin has done basically the opposite of everything it said it would do…who could’ve guessed?

What? Basically everything they’ve done was laid out in project 2025. The people who voted for this were warned about exactly what has happened.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#40

Post by fragmede »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #32
rhelz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees." When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you…

[flagged]

When things are monitored to such a degree that a startup I was at couldn't bring doughnuts to a meeting because NASA was gonna there and that could possibly be a bribe, I don't know about efficient, but there's a reason why DOGE couldn't really find any waste.
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