Fiscal Insanity: The Government Borrows $6 Billion a Day, and We’re Stuck with the Bill
John whitehead
We’re not living the American dream. We’re living a financial nightmare. The US government is funding its existence with a credit card.
The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.
According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.
As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:
“The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come, and will require cuts to critical programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is not a future anyone wants.”
Let’s talk numbers, shall we?
The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $31 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. That translates to roughly $246,000 per taxpayer or $94,000 for every single person in the country.
The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.
It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).
In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.
The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.
Interest payments on the national debt are estimated to top $395 billion this year, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.
According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”
In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.
This is financial tyranny.
We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.
None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.
Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.
If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.
Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.
We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.
In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.
“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.
Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.
We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.
It wasn’t always this way, of course.
Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.
It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”
Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.
On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.
It’s all gone downhill from there.
Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.
While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.
To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.
For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.
Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.
The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.
As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”
Most recently, the U.S. has allocated nearly $115 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine since the start of the Russia invasion.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.
This is no way of life.
Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.
We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.
There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.
Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.
Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.
And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.
But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
Spending money it doesn’t have, borrowed from those that don’t have it either.
Fictions borrowing fictitious from fictions.
The only thing of value in this world is people, their efforts, and the earth they’re made from and to which their efforts are applied.
The debt resides with the crown or state- leave them with it and move on….
Articles like this one perpetuate many of the misconceptions about money. To what end one might ask? In short money (in a so called free market) is a proxy for real goods, which is a proxy for human energy. An issuer of money can create and spend in any amount relative to the real products / services available. Who gets this privilege in a supposed sovereign state, what form it takes and how it is allocated are the central issues of the current system.
The real kicker here is the powers that shouldn’t be are about to supplant the current system (which virtually no one understands) with an even more centrally controlled (you could say totalitarian) coupon system. So there’s that.
A previous attempt at trying to deal with the debt problem; a.k.a. the central banking cartel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralis_praeeminentiae
Pastoralis praeeminentiae was a papal bull issued by Pope Clement V on 22 November 1307 to all Christian monarchs. It ordered the arrest of all Knights Templar and to seize their properties on behalf of the church. Clement was forced to support the campaign against the Templars by Philip IV of France, who owed them a great deal of money and had initiated the first arrests against the Templars on 13 October 1307.[1]
Despite the papal request, not all the monarchs complied immediately, most notably, Edward II of England who at first refused to believe the allegations, but later carried out the order.
Following the arrests, a period of trials was sanctioned against the Templars, enforced by torture and pain-induced confessions.
—
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_IV_of_France
Philip IV (April–June 1268 – 29 November 1314), called Philip the Fair (French: Philippe le Bel), was King of France from 1285 to 1314.
In 1306 Philip expelled the Jews from France, followed by the total destruction of the Knights Templar the next year in 1307.
Philip was substantially in debt to the Knights Templar, a monastic military order whose original role as protectors of Christian pilgrims in the Latin East had been largely replaced by banking and other commercial activities by the end of the 13th century.[39] As the popularity of the Crusades had decreased, support for the military orders had waned, and Philip used a disgruntled complaint against the Knights Templar as an excuse to move against the entire organization as it existed in France, in part to free himself from his debts.
His final year saw a scandal amongst the royal family, known as the Tour de Nesle affair, in which Philip’s three daughters-in-law were accused of adultery. His three sons were successively kings of France: Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV. Their rapid successive deaths without surviving sons of their own would compromise the future of the French royal house, which had until then seemed secure, precipitating a succession crisis that would eventually lead to the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
Philip suffered a cerebral stroke during a hunt at Pont-Sainte-Maxence (Forest of Halatte),[47] and died a few weeks later, on 29 November 1314, at Fontainebleau, [aged 46].
—
Discussed here:
‘The Huxley’s Brave New World Order’ [Series 1]
[SF115]
Ep1 Echoes of the Huxley’s Sheep Farm Meet The Flockers
Sheep Farm Studios
Premiered Apr 5, 2023
Series 1 is in 4 episodes. Series 1 is an introduction of sorts and not specifically about the Huxley family rather series 1 shows the synchronicities and links back to the various Huxley’s and population changing events.
There will be 4 2hr+ Episodes released in two formats as ‘Podumentary Presentations’ [YouTube/Rumble] and Podcasts [www.sheepfarm.co.uk]
In Ep1 Echoes of the Huxley’s will discuss the connection between the first summer of love in 1967 and the second summer of love between 1988-89 in the UK, the use of LSD & MDMA/ecstasy and their use in mind control. We will also cover the use of symbology that was used like the Smiley Face, used in many influential cultural changes, like Nirvana, The Watchman & Emoji’s.
We look at significant happenings on the 22nd November, like Blackbeard the Pirate’s death, Margret Thatcher loses power and many more. The rise of the Fabian Society with founding links in the Huxley family.
Trump’s America First Hoax comes to mind.
On the subject of American income tax, Aaron Russo ‘Mad as Hell’ series, made a film about the Income Tax issue.
Any thoughts on the fact they the film raises the issue on whether the law for income tax was ratified?
Sure seems like social engineering trumps law (ratified or not) just about every time.
One ring to rule them all. The Financial Apparatus, A Hydra if you will.
Mentioned by past American Presidents.
Lincoln falling foul to just a mere malcontent (Mr Booth), and not because he was warning about Debt Slavery of people and governments and stood in the way of the creation of the Federal Reserve like private enterprise.
JFK, falling victim to a rusky, and not because he was trying to replace The Feds notes, with Treasury notes. Them, pesky bankers, need their wars, cause thats where the Bankers make their money and create the debt slaves. I’m sure its for the ‘Greater Good’
Just follow the money. One ring to rule them all.
https://deadline.com/2023/04/p-g-wodehouses-jeeves-wooster-books-changed-for-unacceptable-prose-1235327256/
P G Wodehouse is the latest literary icon to be “rehabilitated” via a filter to remove prose so frightfully offensive to our delicate modern sensibilities.
But note the authors who have previously been airbrushed: Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl. All popular to be sure – but, like our Wodehouse, not really on that uppermost enclave of most respected figures.
Isn’t there something cowardly about this purge? Isn’t there a sense of dipping toes to see how many ripples can be made?
The whole world has been sold a bill of goods by politicians. But the politicians are just the middle men, the slave drivers, the greedy nearly inhuman beings that follow orders.
Politicians, and the governments they operate, only respond to the private corporations and oligarchs that own them. Whatever the corporate officers, directors and Oligarch owners want become government sponsored programs designed to further exploit the territorial constrained, rule of law controlled, propaganda enticed governed public.
Rule of law and propaganda tools are implemented and used to control the governed public. Rule of law and propaganda outperform locking people in a steel-encased key-gated lock down cell. Covid is an example of such control.
I remind that it is said, only four privately owned corporations own 80% of all of the media in the world and nearly all of the worlds corporations support the propaganda those four media owners distribute with advertising dollars. No other four corporations get paid money from nearly everyone in the world. None of the owners or operators of the four media corporations are elected by any governed public I am familiar with.
The governed public has no oversight over the largest, most influential segments of our economy, the federal reserve and the media.
Soon robots will replace the media and the working parts of the government.. even more control will happen.. The enemy to freedom is not the government because government is a structural and functional expression of the will of those who control the government. The challenge to freedom is coming the massive in size, powerful, monopoly powered corporations. Spending is a government thing. Currency is issued by a third party (the central bank schema of the federal reserve) with an attendant obligation of those who are the governed to pay interest on the face value of the debt obligations. The burden to pay the interest on that debt falls on the taxpayers. Government is responsible both for collecting the debt repayment from its tax payers, and for spending the debt created currency.
Its not the fault of government, I blame those who control the staffing and operation of the government (certainly not the governed); the staff of government is selected by the Oligarchs who direct the selection of westernized nation states. Don’t blame the government, or its staff, its the Oligarchs in charge of our nation state governments that engineer legal, bureaucratic, physical, emotional tools and create artificial devices into weapons that are to blame. These weapons of mass control (WMCs) have been automated and woven into automated systems which can be used to control behaviors, thoughts, spending patterns, beliefs and expectations of the governed public. Oligarch needs become government programs implemented for profit by privately owned corporations.
Oligarchs have directed that Governments privatize their profit making resources and monopolies. As a result nearly all monopoly powers given governments by those who are the governed have been moved from public domain to private domain? Oligarchs have engineered the structure and function of governments to satisfy the needs and greeds of the Oligarchs. Western governments today are little more than oligarch engineered profit making tools.
Your under estimating the typical persons cowardice and / or ignorance. It sure seems that people do what they are generally incentivized to do. As you say covid was a good example.
It is America’s debt that is leading it to the fate of Sterling and the British Empire almost a century ago. Empires come and go – but don’t see it coming.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
It’s the mesmerism thing again.
They see it coming all right, but they are dazzled into immobility by the bright lights…
If a government prints the money, why do the people have to pay taxes? It doesn’t make any sense at all?
If a private company is printing the money and then selling the money to the government … that is ILLEGAL because ONLY the government of of the country is legally authorised by the people to produce the currency.
If a/the government has sold-off the right to print the money, JAIL the government because they are acting criminally and have exceeded their ‘democratic’ authority.
Democratically elected DO NOT have the right to cede the people’s birthright to private businesses. Any minister or government who mentions PRIVATE/PUBLIC partnerships for the construction of any infrastructure, has stopped working for the people and should be booted out.
Sorry to tell you that this is precisely what happens. The law you speak of does not exist.
By far the majority of money in circulation is issued as debt by the banks. The exception is currency (notes and coins) which are indeed issued by the government. The scam is called fractional reserve banking. There’s lots about it on the web. You could a lot worse than start here:
Good point on banks creating money, but the notion of fractional reserve is but another layer of the deception. Technically, legally “depositors” loan money to banks. While in the banks hands it is legally their money. In this light the notion of fractional reserve is relegated to semantics, at best. And reserves play no or little part in restricting a bank from issuing more loans aka printing money.
More generally many (meaning the overwhelming vast majority of us) need to grow up about money and move beyond the ignorant implanted moral objections about it. Articles like this one perpetuate many of the misconceptions about money. To what end one might ask? In short money (in a so called free market) is a proxy for real goods, which is a proxy for human energy. An issuer of money can create and spend in any amount relative to the real products / services available. Who gets this privilege in a supposed sovereign state, what form it takes and how it is allocated are the central issues of the current system.
The real kicker here is the powers that shouldn’t be are about to supplant the current system (which virtually no one understands) with an even more centrally controlled (you could say totalitarian) coupon system. So there’s that.
I always laugh (which almost constantly) when they use the phrase ‘printing more money’, as though you could create money by simply printing more of it. It’s this kind of newspeak which dumbs people down and prevents them from asking the simple question ‘how can a country be in debt to itself?’.
‘how can a country be in debt to itself?’. government issues a bond to pay for the cash, so bonds payable appears on the countries books; the country d\n pay the bond off, the taxpayers pay the bond payable off. simplified it might look like this:
on the countries books debits credits
Printed Cash ( recd for distribution into the economy) $100.00
interest @ 4% on bond payable over 30 years 324.34
30 year bond payable (the countries debt) $424.34
the debit usually appears on the countries books as bonds payable.
the bond payable(<=countries debt, is paid off by its taxpayers).
on the books of the private company that printed the cash it looks like this
assuming the issuing bank bought the bond with the cash it printed.
cash printed $100.00
cash distributed $100.00
Interest receivable over 30 years on the bond $324.34
income earned on the 30 year bond $324.34
the two $100 dollars in bold cancel each other out.
this is a very simplified outline of the transaction. if
someone has a better simplified example, please post it.
I hope i have not made a mistake by over simplifying the example
Your missing the point.
Yup, the stupid is very thick and articles like this one only reinforce the stupid. In essence the system has virtually all “public goods” being paid for by taxpayers multiple times over. Once with real labor, once due to the money form (ie debt) and again, or multiples thereof, for the interest.
The biggest scam of our debt-based system is the US government has the right to issue debt-free currency. Instead, the Treasury borrows money from the privately owned Federal Reserve at interest. That tells you all you need to know in order to understand who really runs the US “government”.
Every single president who tried that was either assassinated or they tried to have killed.
Andrew Jackson was the victim of 4 assassination attempts during his presidency for denying the bankers charter.
Working as intended.
The FED, and the Central Bank Cartel, cannot stand any form of Representative Government. Rothschild took control of the USA as soon as the FED was created.
The Boom and Bust cycle is not an accident and is the process of transferring wealth.
Almost all physical gold was stolen and transferred to the Central Bank Cartel during WW1 and WW2.
No one else has any substantial gold reserves, regardless of what is claimed.
That’s a typical historical diversion scapegoating tactic of ‘ww1’ december 1915 dismissives., took over the USA don’t be redicious.
Their influence is not to be underestimated.
What started off as a family talent for high finance has become a family tradition of manipulation.
The talent has been bought and sold for lower purposes than the efficient management of money.
I see it as a situation comparable to that of the many great composers who had musically worthless offspring (although of course they may well have had other abilities).
The money which changes hands today is not to the benefit of human beings.
That maybe but you’ll noticed commentary moving mayor names around to cover a hundred years of human conflict like chess pieces. This is typical Contintental game playing by US Dollar travelling freelancers from the 20th Century!! ww1…ww2..Moronic. imo.
Both of the crucial measures regarding gold in the USA were not during world wars – the creation of the Exchange Stabilization Fund was in 1934 and coming off the gold standard was in 1971. It might be noticed those stand 1-1 for Democrats and Republicans so as usual the central parts of the agenda proceed on a bipartisan basis.
The former is described by Jeff Berwick as “the biggest robbery in recorded history without shooting anyone”. I studied the New Deal up to Masters’ level and it was never mentioned in any lecture nor recommended book. Americans had to exchange their gold for $20 an ounce and then the gold was immediately revalued to $35 an ounce
Your being foolhardy into believing you’ve mastered a darn thing other than your own language.
Unilaterally stockpiled Gold leads to Hundred year Wars. Mastering is meaningless and completely irrelevant. Your logged into a belief reading books has parliamentary applications, it doesn’t.
Off topic – and on an Ickean theme:
I just started watching a series called Sweet Home on Netflix. It’s a Korean apocalyptic series featuring humans mutating into monsters – like a typical zombie thing only with pic ‘n mix creatures. The whole thing is pretty batshit crazy and leaves you feeling as if you might start hallucinating. Indeed, the most disturbing thing about it isn’t so much the effects as the seemingly random plot and downright weird way the characters seem to behave. Watching the thing is like being gaslighted.
But here’s the curious thing: filming of this began in September 2019 and was completed in February 2020. And the opening scene is set in September 2020. Interesting timing considering how it dovetails with Event 201 and the ensuing covid/reset/new normal thing.
Probably predictive programming.
Some have speculated that’s it’s a way to break up the States– we’ll have to sell off part of our land to pay the debt. Whatever the exact means, it’s clear that destruction of the US is in progress: So much easier to produce global slavery if the developed countries like US & Europe are helpless. After all, TPTB don’t intend that our countries should emerge rulers of anything.
If you look, you will find that all the National Parks and almost all the National Monuments have UNESCO Heritage Site as part of the program. It is my understanding that this is an indication that those sites are being sold off.
Texans have forgotten the Alamo, that is now UNESCO behind the scenes.
Its all part of The Plan. Ultra-right thinkers regard government as a nuisance, they like to wield state power to further their interests but they don’t like it when state power interferes with what they want to do. So their philosophy is to shrink the state not so much to get it to the size where “it can be drowned in the bathtub” but where its primarily a security apparatus securing their interests from potential threats, domestic and foreign. The problem is how to do this. The legislative approach won’t work so they’ve been using the “spend the government into bankruptcy” approach, a tactic that not only will work eventually but can also grossly enrich them in the process.
Remember, money itself is merely a nominal medium of exchange, its a stand in for value rather than actual value, so the actual numbers are meaningless. What’s important is tangible assets. (This explains why its so easy to get loans against an asset — money’s cheap and plentiful and any secured loan effectively transfers ownership of that asset.)
I’ve watched how in the US the Republicans, supposedly the party of fiscal probity, have relentlessly and needlessly driven the country further and further into debt. Early attempts to push back resulting in President Clinton getting the budget into balance and even surplus were rapidly dealt with after 2000 (a war is a good way to spend money — which is, when you think about it, just a way of transferring wealth).
The future is relatively bleak because — unfortunately — large chunks of the world are on to us and are refusing to play this game. They know that this kind of policy inevitably ends up in a post-colonial society characterized by huge wealth disparities,s fractured society that’s almost feudal in character. We humans can do better.
Martin, did you misspeak? Surely it’s not bleak if, indeed, other countries will refuse to cooperate with destruction of the world economy.
Unfortunately, I think they’re falling for another con game– “multipolarity” in name only, wherein they trade their real power for a vote as to which rules they’ll live under.
The ‘other countries’ have their own agenda. Back in the Good Old Days they wouldn’t — they’d do it our way or they’d find their economies ruined, their people in revolt and their government displaced. This still happens, of course, but because we in the US have rather overdone the Soft Power thing we don’t have the resources to quickly destroy a country’s economy any more if its over a certain size – people have come up with ways around our economic warfare and they’re now starting to band together in a coordinated attempt to push back. Our military is then used as a last resort but, once again, due to hubirs we’ve misused it, wasting in it places like Afghanistan and Iraq to the point that its having serious recruitment problems. (There’s no glory in being a foot soldier, merely PTSD.)
We still pack a punch. Our intelligence gathering capability is enormous, our ability to infiltrate and destabilize is first class and our weapons systems are effective against anyone who can’t shoot back. But the first time a F-35 gets taken out will be either the End of Empire or the Start of WW3. We’re used to making everyone else fight for their lives (and lose…..) but we’re at a point where the schoolyard bully has finally been faced down — and the long term prospects are ‘not great’.
Just think how happy everyone could be if we went in for mutual cooperation. We can still compete — the world is a sports league — but there’s none of this Age of Empire BS. It can be done — in fact it has to be done.
Dick Cheney said that deficits don’t matter. Guess he’d know. Is Grover Norquist, of drown it in a bathtub fame, still alive?
Grover is very much alive.
Well… No one is actually borrowing any “thing” other than their children’s futures. Which isn’t a thing…
The “Reset” is simply a more streamlined accounting system, so the Bank for International Settlements and other mafia controlled transnationals, can dictate the terms of your collateralized enslavement.
All forms of taxation are criminally sanctioned theft. Quit falling for the bogus definitions.
Hemingway said there are two ways to go bankrupt.
Just imagine for a moment that there was a higher power, and one day this higher power orders your police force to begin seizing property to the tune of $94,000 from every citizen, in order to pay off the US debt?
I guess there would be some movement in attitudes then.
As for US foreign aid. This has been debunked. There is no US foreign aid and never was. Food and dollars were being used as bargaining chips and were also used by ‘NGO’s’ to assist terrorist groups.
That’s 150 countries receiving interference from the US and nato allies that could erupt at anytime the US feels ‘threatened’. Threatened, is a euphemism for disrupting or preventing their exploitation.
Apparently the IRS are concerned that something like $1.4 billion dollars remains to be refunded to the US taxpayer but is presently unclaimed. Get claiming before Congress hoovers up the lot and buys more rubber hammers.
Peter, also when the US gave food aid, it bankrupted the receiving country’s farming sector, opening it up for US or fellow-travellers to co-opt it.
The money’s been spent. If you’re owed by the Treasury then you’ll find you own “rubber hammer certificates”. They’ll sell one or two to refund you…..so provided only a few people need refunds at a time we’re OK. Just don’t do a run on the bank….
Exactly , run the bank your shooting yourself in the foot killing someone else. Old adage, the someone else is your twin.
1960’s Who needs a fucking education, well apparently some still do. You out there, black marketeers and home based twins.
Oh, carry on labelling tagging yourself We all have to get through this crisis.
Ok, you got a group of oligarchs, they can print money of of thin air, gee, what could you do? Everthing has a price, let’s take over the world!
And so many corrupt politicians who have had their palms greased to allow it.
Denialism, “not of our making”..rubbish.
It’s 90 Trillion following on post1946. The American Dream began in 1919., following on from the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901. The Dollar became The World’s Reserve Currency in 1913. In The British Isles..what We bought by 1969 1979 1989 belongs to The People of The United Kingdom working through 70 years of Laboured death duties represented by The Union Banners., of England Wales Scotland Ireland. One Thousand and Fifty Years 973-2023.
I don’t think it is insane at all. This is the government performing it’s core task :the mass transferral of wealth from the schmucks to the owners, under whatever pretext is currently available.
Obviously this would be insane if the government were sincerely trying to represent the people and their interests, but they aren’t and that has been more than obvious for a long time.
The old adage “Nothing from nothing is nothing” expresses the world’s economy as nothing else can.
It’s over. The free ride humanity has had on the back of the Earth is drawing to a close. We’ve picked it clean. How do I know this? They wouldn’t be thinking about mining the ocean floor if they could still get enough from the land to fuel the world’s economy.
So let them keep printing their funny money – or digitizing it. A trillion in debt? Let’s go for a quadzillion. Soon even a ten spot won’t be able to be paid back – so why not go for broke? Nobody’s ever going to pay for anything, ever again, anyway.
Why else do you think debt is the fastest growing commodity on the planet?
‘They’ are thinking of mining the ocean floor because there are minerals just lying about on the sea floor. Minerals which take some getting to on the surface. This extra mining is being considered because of the green energy nuts who believe a 0.03 concentration of CO2 is warming the planet and they want their new electric toys.
It seems the production of African boys isn’t quite fast enough for the green lobby.
Howard, I’m sorry you’ve bought into “Humanity’s a cancer on the earth” or Peak Oil or Peak Minerals. The psychopaths who’re trying to kill us are the authors of this fiction.
Howard is a brainwashed tool yet knows not… sad times
Absence of ideology does not equate to brainwashing. Very few of those who frequent this forum seem capable of stepping outside their very rigid and narrow ideology to think rationally about things that are happening.
Accordingly, any opinion which deviates from this ideology is viewed as ipso facto erroneous. Sad indeed.
Indeed. I don’t need to follow some ideology when I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears what is happening: Constant geoengineering, constant overconsumption, a crash in insect and bird populations, particularly apparent this spring, and most people running around trying to consume to keep up with the Joneses, completely unaware of what is actually going on around them, of what they are partaking in.
There are some strong dogmas on this comment section. I suspect that the “pristine Earth” type of people who deny that anything is amiss in the natural world don’t go outside and pay attention to what is around them all that much. Trust your senses, not your ideology.
Hes an American.
The psychopaths are the very ones profiting most from the planet’s resources. How exactly does it serve their interest to trick us into thinking these resources are fast running out?
Here’s an explanation how:
https://rumble.com/v22w7wa-big-oil-lie.html
Lamp oil cronies.
These terrorists in the media had better face punishment for their crimes. This terrorist for example, Teresa Lambe, of Oxford University (spews), writing for The Independent.
Voices: Will we ever reach a point where Covid is no longer a threat to our everyday lives? (msn.com)
The article goes on to make several fraudulent points. I hate these people so much:
Someone needs to educate this terrorist, preferably with a long prison sentence
Spot the vested interest. The article isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Like ‘news’ stories released by charities.
I skipped through seeking something I couldn’t find, please forgive me if I missed it. I was hoping for a fact which would make the calculations unnecessary. The US congress can PRINT IT’S OWN MONEY. It doesn’t need to borrow a cent. The Federal Reserve Bank is not federal: it’s privately owned. The IRS is privately owned as well. So there you have it. There’s a special legal term for a debt that’s dodgy – ODIOUS DEBT. I think there’s enough proof that this debt is ODIOUS but as the legal system is owned by the banksters, a lot of reforms are necessary before LAW can be used.
I skimmed a lot of the article myself. The Whiteheads are a bit out of their depth taking on the economy – it needs someone like Ellen Brown. Perhaps that’s why the article focused so much on the policing of America aspect of the economy – that’s where the Whiteheads shine.
John Titus is the man, you can be sure he’d never get the job! Perhaps Richard Werner or Catherine Austin Fitts.
The so-called government, a corporation, secures the private Central Bank fiat-currency loan, by fraudulently converting the people (ie.without informed consent) into legal-fictions as collateral, all under the ‘legal’ commercial umbrella of a corporation masquerading as a government.
Yes, the ‘government’ is really a private corporation, using maritime law as its legal system. The ‘people’ are not regarded as living women and men, but as “strawmen” with no rights.
Lots of info here: https://annavonreitz.com/
The Dangerous Myth of ‘Taxpayer Money’
“Taxpayer money” doesn’t reflect how public spending actually works. A household or a business may have to stash or borrow money before it can spend, but we are users of the currency. The U.S. government is the issuer of the currency.”
A lot of money in the system is bank credit, especially from the 1980’s on, but this is only because the Wall St-controlled government is eternally constraining net issuance of its own currency, thereby increasing demand for bank credit. Austerity is a policy to subsidize the financial sector by creating artificial currency shortages.
All of this artificially manufactured private debt should be cancelled since it was dishonorably induced by means of deception. Top economists like Steve Keen and Michael Hudson advise writing it down or cancelling it altogether.
“Everyone from Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, they were all reforms. What they wanted to reform was getting rid of this parasitic landlord class that had conquered England in 1066 and it’s the heirs of the military warlords who ended up taking the land and making everybody pay them and all of their descendants just for having been conquered. You can see the carry-over of this today. The rent that people have to pay, the money they have to pay the banks instead of having a public option. That’s the price they still have to pay for being conquered.” ~ Michael Hudson
Excellent explanation of this 50-yr. economic fraud:
Neoliberal Economics – Professor Michael Hudson
“A rentier is someone who is not technologically necessary for society.” ~ Michael Hudson
Since they are fully aware that they are not necessary, they are trying to lock in their relevance by controlling their own CBDCs.
Hudson’s main point is that rentiers
-. benefit from political privilege (of all sorts, e.g., licence, tax exemption, grant, special lease)
-. are a major burden on the rest of society including the productive economy.
Bill Hicks offers some valuable insight into this from 1997:
Deficit (Jesse Helms) – YouTube
Rant In E Minor in full. One of his best, for sure:
Bill Hicks – Rant In E-Minor (1997) – YouTube
Awesome rant by Bill, thanks for that link! Better to listen to him than to read more outrage inducing idiocy.
“We’re Stuck with the Bill”
my understanding, shareholders in big US corporates are constantly rewarded. the QE series were implemented for this purpose, i.e. to pay shareholders.
one of the fancy weapons the US defense is planning for 2024:
“a ‘Rocket Cargo’ transport that can move 100 tons of cargo anywhere on Earth within an hour”
the US$ is a BOMBS-backed currency!
can you imagine what kind of cargo they need to move so quickly? with a rocket like this, creditors will think twice and thrice before causing financial trouble for the US.
Sad to say, this is by now an old story. Surely none of us here haven’t heard it before.
The Government living on OUR credit…?
But of course!
I no longer have any interest in the sordid details.
I just want to know who is doing what to stop it.
+100
All that’s needed to continue the fleecing of the American people is for a few politicians to say all our money is being handed over to illegal immigrants and dark skinned dwellers of ghettos. And we must therefore keep increasing the military and police funding.
Yes, the illegals and the ghetto dwellers live scandalously luxurious lives!
Prejudice is alive and well and living it up in America. (And one of our costlier vices.)
You see the US as a country. That is, a group of people who produce value and pay taxes for expenses they choose to share. This may have been true in 1800, it’s no longer true today.
The US government is a worldwide policeman whose value lies in maintaining a system of trade backed up by force. Large parts of the world send goods to the US in return for dollars. Goods flow in, paper flows out. This works as long as the value created by the system of trade is greater than the cost of maintaining the system.
You’re living like a world boss while pretending to be a farmer. Just like the Romans did.
The story is similar for most of the western world. In the UK at the start of covid, the govt threw money around like there was no tomorrow. Now everything is broken. I think they’re deliberately appearing to be inept to make us think a global government would do a better job.
Unfortunately this is nonsense. Governments that are monopoly issuers of free floating currencies are financially constrained. Deficit spending is in fact government investment in the private sector and therefore increases the non-government sector’s wealth. When such government’s ‘borrow’, usually from private sector investment funds, in the form of guilts, this is a charade and is merely corporate welfare in the form of the interest rate charged.
Such governments annual ‘deficit’ and the aggregate of these, the overall ‘debt’, is matched, penny for penny, by the private sector’s wealth. There is absolutely no need for such governments to borrow.
When these governments run a budget ‘surplus’ it reduces, by definition, the private sector’s, i.e you and I plus firm’s, wealth.
These scare tactics such as the deficit cliff and the debt counter clock are exactly that. It’s a basic accounting relationship, someone’s debt is another’s credit. Government spending creates wealth, taxation destroys it. These governments do no need tax to fund spending. Taxation is used to create space in the economy for government programmes and to control certain behaviours e.g. tobacco and alcohol duties.
Please study Modern Monetary Theory.
That should read ‘not financially constrained’.
You can edit a comment with the cogwheel on the bottom right. It only appears when you hover the mouse over the comment.
I think it’s worth mentioning that, unless something’s changed, the edit feature is only enabled for 15 minutes after the comment is first posted.
So, before you click that elusive “edit” button, make sure to have your corrections ready to plug in, and resist the urge to take the editing opportunity to fiddle with the original text!
I speak from bitter experience. 🤔
You start with “Unfortunately this is nonsense”, which is probably true. Most comments about government finance (including mine) do not survive logical thinking. It would be interesting to see various theories of government finance lined up and compared.
Issuing a treasury creates an obligation from the US government to the holders of US debt. If the government uses this money to earn more profits than it pays interest, it becomes richer. If it does not, it becomes poorer. For example, if you borrow to fund social security, you incur an interest obligation without increasing future income.
The problem with MMT is that it assumes unending faith in the government. What this article attempts to show is that the US now has too many interest obligations. If true, people will lose faith in treasuries, and the ability of the US government to buy things in return for treasuries will end.
Point is, these types of governments cannot become richer or poorer. We, people and firms, can only increase our wealth if our government deficit spends, i.e, spends more than it taxes. We become poorer with a government surplus. It’s counterintuitive, but true.
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?s=Deficit+
Bill Mitchell is a fantastic economist but falls for the Covid nonsense which is very disappointing.
And therewith, at the typing of a few lines of “that’s just the way it is” philosophy, our western politicians and governments would seem to be miraculously let off the hook…
I prefer to help along the view that the days of excusing rampant systemic corruption are quickly coming to an end.
I certainly won’t excuse it any more.
It’s political will. The government can choose to deploy resources, i.e spend, on creating world class services and public realm and buy up as much armaments or pharmaceuticals as long as there are idle resources in the economy to produce such. The fact that all of these governments choose to do the latter and pretend they cannot ‘afford’ the former is becomes they are controlled by the neo-liberal elites. MMT is not an economic policy, it is a lens to examine how our fiat currency operates in practice.
MMT has been the operating principle of the US economic system at least since 1913. How the government spends is purely political and as we should know controlled by oligarchical special intertest. The endless flow goes largely to the MIC and its cohorts. Nothing new about MMT. Touting it as a means to spend on public “goods” over “bads” is a political issue and has been for some time. MMT will become meaningless as the dollar reserve goes south. The economy is ruled by the investment/banking system and that is debt-based. Scale is perhaps the single most important variable to an economy as if people matter.
The tree of Liberty needs refreshing..
With the blood of patriots if need be – but most certainly with the blood of tyrants.
The so called “establishment” in both the USA and the U.K. have successfully perverted the system so that no one is ever held accountable for the disasters their policies cause.
The only accountability is dumped onto the citizenry who are left with the bill, while the perpetrators walk away as wealthy people.
Two banana republics without any bananas.
…or nuts.
Thats what the political revival of the proverbial fig leaf has been trying to hide for some time now.