US national debt surges past $39 Trillion
apnews.com
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When their party of choice comes into power, it's always "spend, spend, spend" - how else do you do all the things you want to do while in power? Then the table turns and they pretend to care while the other party takes a turn.
Round and round we go, deeper and deeper in debt, spending like a there's no tomorrow.
We don't need a new party necessarily, just a constitutional amendment that the government can only spend money from direct tax proceeds, with no pre-emptive withholding.
It's not hard, you just have to make rich people pay taxes. This is an enormously popular idea.
You should tax behaviours you want to disincentivise.
Taxing smoking, cars and sugar are great (but not always popular) ideas.
Taxing second homes, property ownership for companies, foreign owned property, and so on is much more important than taxing unrealised wealth, inheritance or capital gains and income.
Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
We should figure out what they do with their wealth that makes it worthwhile amassing so much, then tax that.
EDIT: sorry, I should have echo’d the chamber instead of thinking about a situation critically.
> Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
Sounds like we should get rid of these wealthy people then...
I’m a socialist, but I have a brain.
Anything you can think of to make wealthy people cease to exist is easily bypassed, so the best way is to find ways to tax behaviour instead.
The point of money is how you use it, if you have a 50,000x tax on super yacts and private aircraft, then the ultra rich are forced to pay your tax or try skirting around it by using smaller boats or coalescing their private jets into a private airline.
But if you tax stocks, then people will invest in other ways. If you tax individuals owning large property then they’ll move their property ownership into a company, if you tax inheritance then they’ll put the money into a fund instead which has debts that will be written off in time. All kinds of fancy tricky accounting.
The other solution is to tax everyone on unrealised gains, which makes every home owner (including pensioners) suddenly liable for huge ongoing bills.
Elon himself for example is pretty cash poor, but owns a lot of stock in a “high value” company meaning his wealth on paper is pretty extreme. He takes on debt (which has no income tax) and then pays it off with stocks, where it also avoids being taxed as its never realised.
I think its a harder problem than you give it credit.
- someone who bought an investment property, which then appreciated, and then they wanted to take out a larger mortgage against the appreciated value to leverage it into buying another property.
- Someone borrowing against stock to avoid realising gains by selling it
That seems… reasonable to me?
See also: X, Meta, Blackwater…
There is a reason that fiscal conservatives spend all their time on food stamps, environmental regulations, and a few random research projects and not even examining any of the top four costs that make up the overwhelming bulk of US spending.
It seems more like an abandoned stance than a lie at this point.
We have a high cost of living but we also have the highest taxes. Up to 10% depending on where you live. In return for that we get next to nothing. Public money is spent poorly, with no oversight, and no accountability.
Only once you're very secure and comfy in your little corner does "your image abroad" even have any meaning at all.
"How tasty would the beer need to be to justify the burned rancid steak, to make this diner better than the other one?" -- basically
How about “socially progressive and fiscally effective”?
- Won't start a war
- Won't speak like a 5yo kid
- Won't run around and desert you
So there's never a particular point that it "comes back to bite us" - if anything, the "bite" is happening already right now for all of us. Inflation is a form of taxation on currency. It's less like credit card debt and more like wage garnishing.
It's also worth pointing out that young people are less affected by inflation than old - retirees and people with savings. Inflation is good for people in debt. So it's not so much your children you have to worry about with today's debt level so much as it is yourself.
This is misleading.
US debt as GDP percentage is higher than for any other nation except Italy and Greece, and was much lower historically, too (<50%ish for basically the last century instead of >100% now).
So the status quo is not how government spending gets typically resolved.
Racking up public debt risks runaway inflation, which is unpleasant for everyone.
Japan is much higher-- I did not have that in my dataset, appears to be at 230% debt but decreasing pretty rapidly (down from almost 260% in 2020).
So when a government bond matures it is replaced automatically with a simple bank deposit. It’s nothing more than an asset swap.
“People with savings” are precisely why there is a “debt” in the first place. When they spend those savings they pass tax points which then creates the tax that retires the “debt”.
To put it in simple terms the “grandchildren” will “service the debt” using the counterparty “savings assets”inherited from their “grandparents”.
Don’t fall for the standard narrative. It’s not true.
This is magical thinking. The bonds are actually held by investors, and when investors see them as a losing bet, they will stop buying them. Unless you think American taxpayers will suddenly be willing to live within our means, it’s a real problem.
The current reserve currency status means that people often use the bonds for reasons other than returns, but we need to not fool ourselves into assuming this paradigm is permanent. Once real inflation gets going, it’s just a coordination problem to change the reserve instrument. After that, the intersection between what the US can feasibly return and what investors require can quickly evaporate.
We are currently on a Japanese trajectory, but that could easily become Argentina.
largest investor will be or already a Fed, and it will continue buying if there is political will.
If that is the plan, then hyper-inflation is not only on the table, it starts to become probable. I shouldn't have to explain why that's a problem. There isn't a free lunch here. Yes, inflating the debt away is an option... to a point, but there are still hard limits on what the market will bear.
sure, there are plenty of countries in the world who just print money without all these debt ritual.
> to a point, but there are still hard limits on what the market will bear.
this niche (government prints money to fund its expenses) is not part of any market, but just policy supported by monopoly on violence.
But what the Republicans might be able to do is spend like drunken sailors, and have the crisis happen when the Democrats are in power after 2028. People blame the current president, whether or not he had much of a chance to do anything about it.
Even without any disaster scenarios we spend an immense amount of money every year on debt payments. That money could instead be spent on any number of other use cases that actually produce something useful.
but its US who decides which rates it uses to borrow from itself.
I see its just some process to do all this inflation thing in US, while I imagine various other countries just print the money causing inflation and don't go through debt ceiling approval voting.
Public debt is a significant political talking point in both cases (and even in Germany, with a much lower debt percentage).
The current US administration (and the last republicans in general) did an excellent job in pretending to be the ones fighting public debt when they are actually exacerbating it; I'm curious if there is gonna be a reckoning at some point.
I have sadly no idea how much focus this gets in japanese politics, would be very curious if anyone knows.
I know us is buyoed by the petrodollar, but surely that only goes so far.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/03/16/when-will-highe...
Well, we found another agency that won't last much longer in this administration...
They're both awesome. Anyone who starts talking about all kinds of obvious ways to cut waste in government and isn't dropping references to GAO and CBO reports all over the place, is almost certainly bullshitting you (glares at Elon Musk).
The GOP has hated them for quite a while because they consistently tell them that no, of fucking course cutting taxes won't "pay for itself", but they haven't yet had the votes to get rid of them. Trump can't, they're some of the few government functions that fall under Congress (possible because they don't really administer government, they just issue reports, largely on request, so they're more like research librarians than administrators)
Among the useful suggestions of what to do with it, besides pay down the debt: Keep a slush fund in case of an unexpected war. (This was a few weeks before 9/11.)
Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? - https://evonomics.com/isnt-time-stop-calling-national-debt/
> Imagine you’re the queen or king of a sovereign country. You decide to mint and issue a bunch of tin coins that your people will find useful. You use those coins to buy stuff from people in the private sector, and pay them to do work. Voilà, the people have money.
This describes how you create money. People give work and the government gives money. But that isn't what national debt is? That would be when the people give money to the government and don't get work in return, but the promise to pay more money back. This then means that some amount of taxes can't go back to things the government wants to give back to the people, but needs to go to the interest holders instead.
Given that I already don't understand the intro, the whole article sounds like nonsense to me. What am I missing?
That chart doesn't include WWII, which might be the only time that comes close.
From https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/d...
3/19/2025 $36,214,467,819,348.16. --> 3/17/2026 $39,016,762,910,245.14
Yet strangely all Republicans are silent
The whole thing is absurd.
Schrödinger‘s immigrant, doesn’t work and takes American jobs
The media doesn't differentiate these things to deliberately inflate the figures.
The President doesn't need approval for military action, and hasn't for decades. In a not so subtle way, we elect Presidents to make decisive decisions, such as when to engage in a conflict.
And to address your question, the cost is probably neutral so far. We'll need to replace many of the munitions, but we do that anyway. The loss of life is probably the most costly aspect of this conflict thus far.
The constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war and authorize military force. The fact that our country's politicians have manipulated our system to the point that this has been disregarded basically since WWII should never be normalized.
This country has been run by the rich for a very long time and democracy is on its way out.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/hegseth-iran-war-budget.html
> Hassett, speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” said at that time that he did not think the U.S. needed to ask Congress for more money for the war effort “right now.”
> The massive figure would increase production of the critical munitions that the U.S. and Israel have used to strike thousands of targets since the conflict began, three other people familiar with the matter told the Post.
> U.S. military operations against Iran, which began Feb. 28, have already cost $12 billion as of Sunday, according to Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council.
And a reminder, the $12B figure includes all of the normal things that would be spent regardless if we are in a conflict or not.
The cost reports (updated as the conflict goes on) will also include payroll, fuel, food, supplies, etc. Everything needed to conduct the war - but much of that is already spent even if not at war.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-hassett-national-economic...
Are you feeling those tremendous efficiency gains yet?
much worse in reality, many have been replaced by government contractors we are paying 2.5/3x more
And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.
Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.
That all, of course, changes if other countries decide they've had enough of our shit and switch over to different reserve currencies like BRICS. And, of course, printing currency to get out of debt is something that would make countries consider dumping the dollar as a reserve currency.
How it'd likely start is we print to cover a shortfall in debt. Maybe it's 500B, maybe it's 1T.
And we could do that for a bit before entering hyperinflation.
Hyperinflation would start when the TBill rate ends up exploding because people start pricing in dollar printing into the bond rates.
And, as I said, it would be something that would cause countries to start looking at ditching the dollar.
It's not great fiscal policy, but it is something that the US can currently uniquely do and enjoy without the absolute risk of hyperinflation.
and if you're holding cash or bonds, you're even worse off. even if the dollar is devaluing at just 7% per year, that's a 50% loss in just 10 years and that compounds to 75% loss after 20 years.
Of course, to get from 40 trillion to 500 trillion would mean that prices are basically 12x higher, which would mean a lot of inflation will have happened in the meantime. So it would be very bad if the government debt increased by that much in the timespan of one year, because it would basically mean hyperinflation over that span of time. But if that same growth in the debt happened over 400 years, it would be no big deal.
So the relative rate of growth of the government debt certainly matters, because that influences inflation, which is the thing that actually causes problems. Not the size of the debt itself. That is, if G is outstanding government debt, then the figure that matters for inflation is approximately (1/G) dG/dt. But not the absolute level of the government debt G itself.
This also means that compounding interest doesn't really affect the calculation. As the debt grows larger, and the interest payments grow larger, directly in proportion to the size of the debt, and therefore the economy as a whole -- they don't outgrow it. Assuming a steady and reasonable interest rate, at least. If the interest rate were super high or growing without bound, then yes, that would be a problem for the government debt. But that would be a pretty weird thing to happen and wouldn't happen just because the debt figure itself hit some large value, but probably instead because of a currency crisis (eg. the country owes debts to other countries in currencies it does not control).
I'm trying to think of a good way to put this. A person can run out of water and die of thirst, but when you zoom out to bigger and bigger scales, the Earth itself doesn't run out of water; it just goes around in a cycle. Economists have a saying that "one man's expenses are another man's income". For a single household, that doesn't really feel true; the rest of the economy is so big that expenses bascially just disappear from your bank account, and you don't notice any of the money that leaves your pocket when you hire a plumber come back to you, even though some tiny amount actually does when that plumber buys food from your restaurant. So we individuals also can have the experience of debts growing big enough to bankrupt us as the interest payments exceed our income. But governments live on the same scale of economies as a whole, and for them, the recirculation of the money they spend really can't be removed from the analysis.
This kind of intellectual rationalization about something that is obviously not healthy is why people distrust so called experts.
In your analogy, people are dying of thirst, but it's ok because the whole world isn't losing water. Mmmkay.
In my analogy, individual people do need to take care to ensure they don't run out of water. But you don't need to worry that if it rains a lot this year, there won't be any rain left for your children.
Pointing out that earth is a closed system so it's all good doesn't address these very real concerns about our unchecked national debt.
The only big issue here is the interest, which we force ourselves to pay by requiring the issuing of bonds in the first place, and is a big transfer of tax payer money to the large bond-holders.
I don't think people realize that a large share of the government's debt is also a domestic asset. It is still something to be wary of and manage carefully but it is not something that I think is wise to eliminate either. The main concern should be making sure it is being used productively and is not exceeding what the growth of the economy can support (which happens when its used unproductively).
But everything else is just numbers. Stock markets, commodities, gambling, collectibles. real estate... Everything...