1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.
2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.
If people believe we need what we are spending on, we need to tax the difference. It sucks to pay taxes but we need to do it
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.
Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)
Mind you, taxed 20%, not 20% extra. Source: https://www.jw.org/en/news/region/turkmenistan/Turkmenistan-...
All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.
Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.
Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.
They are two distinct things.
Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
The debt graph caught my eye. I did not expect it to be that stable for so long. I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.
Total federal income was flat after the early 80's recession, then grew by 60%+ over the next decade, despite the Reagan tax cuts, increasing $400B.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFR
Federal spending continued to grow.
That's what happened.
One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.
Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)
Another huge expense is servicing our debt.
Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.
By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.
* Bush Jr Tax Cuts
* Useless Iraq war
* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks
* Trumps tax cuts
* COVID spending
When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.
Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.
The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e., "authoritarian populism".
Some of the GOP tried to do that a few years ago, and went against Trump.
They were all destroyed.
There's no longer an escape hatch from this.
Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.
Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.
Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one of the objectives.
The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.
Trump is taking a shit on the US Constitution.
> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.
But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.
What the past few decades did was push enough people to the point of no longer seeing the value in continuing the illusion.
I am terrified of the long term ramifications here. But again, I do see how we ended up here.
It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."
https://casetext.com/case/in-re-aiken-cnty-2
Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
This is not correct.
The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.
The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.
That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
From the Code:
>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...
The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".
However, your conclusion adds:
>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.
The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".
This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.
It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.
The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.
It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.
As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.