U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The military will still get it's $1.5T+ budget tho. There's always enough money for more bombs.
DOGE was an obvious farce that defunded and destroyed necessary programs on a purely ideological basis[0], intimidated government employees[1], created far more tax waste than it ever found, much less claimed[2,3] disrupted legitimate government functions by firing necessary employees who needed to be rehired[4], exfiltrated an unknown amount of private data to Palantir and who knows who else[5,6], and then after permanent damage to the government was done, was closed[7]. It's mission is complete, there's nothing more to hear about them.
I'm sorry if you ever thought DOGE had anything to do with an honest, good-faith effort to reduce government waste. If so, you were lied to. Its purpose was to purge the government of ideological enemies, protect Elon Musk's business interests[8] and lay the groundwork for the transition to authoritarianism.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
[1]https://www.salon.com/2025/02/06/musks-doge-operation-sued-o...
[2]https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/...
[3]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-elon-musk...
[4]https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-gsa-fired-employe...
[5]https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-s...
[6]https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/the-independent-whistl...
[7]https://www.nffe.org/press-release/doge-fails-and-shutters-y...
[8]https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-dog...
I mean it was named after a 4chan shitposting meme, why did anyone take it at face value to begin with?
There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base
Why does this matter? Because anyone claiming "this isn't what I voted for" is lying. They weren't tricked, they weren't deceived by his alluring words, they made a choice knowing what the consequences would be. And now that the consequences are here, they want to cry and pretend like they didn't know. Like a child touching a hot stove.
There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
And in 2016, I may have been sympathetic to this argument. By the time 2024 had rolled around, we had already endured the trainwreck of his first administration, his failures while handling covid, several dozen other major scandals, oh and that insurrection he attempted on January 6th.
So I have no sympathy for anyone who claims they believed what he promised. None whatsoever.
> There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
Look, ultimately here is where I disagree: I am not willing to give any of his supporters the benefit of the doubt anymore. I don't believe for a second that they thought he would cut spending or get the debt down or whatever - he didn't even try in his first term, why would his second be different? Pointing at his promises like they believed them is just giving them cover for their own choices.
> The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
This, we agree on. I personally believe most of his supporters voted for him specifically for the violence and pain he is inflicting on people. That's the only part of his platform that has been consistent, and it's the only part that has been delivered. Ultimately, that is what his voters want and support. They want to hurt their fellow citizens because they hate them. Whether that traces back to decades of Fox News, "economic grievances", whatever, it doesn't matter.
I think more people chose not to vote because they didn't really like Biden (too old) and didn't really believe project 2025 was real, that was more what I meant with that comment.
As far as not believing Project 2025 was real, people can say that until they're blue in the face. The evidence that it was real and supported by the majority of American conservatives, Republicans and Trump voters, and much of it by Trump himself, was obvious to everyone else.
It seemed this way because it was so obviously outrageous. Well, here we are... not outrageous now.
But it was never a conspiracy. The Heritage Foundation is the largest Conservative think-tank in America. They basically write GOP policy and have been for decades. They're not some tiny group of weirdos. They guided basically all of the policy change during the Reagan administration. You know? Ronald Reagan? The blueprint of the modern GOP? Yeah, he didn't come up with that. The Heritage Foundation did.
$80 trillion if it doubles again in 10 years.
Until the pool runs out of funding to do to replace the evaporated water.
How, exactly, are we going to demand sovereignties like China or the EU give us trillions of dollars?
As a serious country you can just keep servicing the bonds with bonds. If the government is... well.... it starts to look more like one of those poker websites where you cant cash out?
The world is full of similar but poorly organized ..., trump is doing one hell of a job uniting them. It seems a lot like that outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond.
I combine some "hallucinated" numbers into a table here
To think about it, we have the perfect president who has been telling creditors to go pound sand for decades: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/...
Sure, and what happens then? Nobody buys new gov bonds; non-gov debt rating stops making sense. For the financial system it's a shock so huge it's better to only do this if no other solution is possible, at which point the gov is bankrupt anyway.
Sanctions, black-listing and potentially more for anyone trying to play cute and do anything that "disadvantages the US". The rest of the world is forced to comply in enforcing it all, because nobody has backing power to stand against the US in any way.
And anyway, most US bonds are held by US domestic entities.
From across the pond, the USA looks like a has been who relies a lot on old merits. The world got bombed to pieces 80 years ago, but has step by step rebuilt itself.
The advantage the US had has been squandered by ineffective leadership.
Forget those, how well are the vaunted US sanctions working against Iran?
Now they're running low on ammo, without having accomplished anything of strategic value...
You mean like the compliance of weak, sanctioned state of Iran with US demands?
Compound interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Currently interest on the debt is ~19% and is growing at a CAGR of 11.2% per year. At the current growth rate, how long until interest on the debt consumes 100% of all tax revenue?
A ray of sunshine & hope: Many state governments who are both low-debt and fiscally conservative will be fine. We also experience small amounts of this with each governmental shutdown.
Start planting fruit trees so the next generation can eat.
untrivial (vast majority) of debt holders are US corps, banks and citizens.
It does not. The Fourteenth Amendment forbids that. Section 4:
"The validity of the public debt of the United States...shall not be questioned."
does US have a trillion dollar worth of Gold reserves every year?
You can end a budget deficit by simply not spending as much from the public purse. You cannot end a trade deficit without restricting freedom of trade.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apple-iphone-us-manuf...
Fantasies of USA autarky are just that.
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.
That debt is never getting paid, I'm afraid.
Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?
Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....
The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
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 spending and departments.
That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
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 like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.
That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
Oh, and stop or limit research into anything not centered at white men.
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...
Second term Bush not so great? Can you think of anything in his first term that maybe impacted the deficit for, say, two decades?
It's probably more in demand as a commodity today than it ever has been.
All these old gold bugs just can't wrap their heads around what exponential growth really looks like. But we can grow our productive capacity far, far faster than we can grow the supply of gold.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
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.
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".
We should be very suspicions of the potential corruption caused by companies and individuals giving money to Trump's pet project.
Finally, we can criticize multiple things at the same time.
This is mostly a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_State_Ballroom#Fun...
Vast majority is to be paid for by taxpayers.
See if you can spot the ethical problems and corruption in that. It's there, I promise you. Look hard.
Really? Wasn't it supposed to be 100% funded by Trump's cronies, who of course were doing so completely out of the goodness of their hearts. Why did that shift to 'majority' private funding? Also, if the funding is so on the up and up, why has Trump refused to release a full audit?
The question is why the other half can't seem to do shit about it.
That may make it seem like nothing every changes, and much wind is spent on it. Real change is often so deep and slow that it just isn't even news. That's because politicians don't usually lead, they follow
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost.
Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results.
Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives could affect more voters with the same amount of money, since spreading bullshit is much cheaper than proving it wrong. The right can flood the zone with a firehose of lies, and even if they literally admit these lies, their voters go along.
But a reasonable interpretation of “the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections” is that such a direct causal link exists.
If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
> If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
As a thought experiment, assume we're playing gods and decide to simulate a bunch of universes almost exactly like ours, so we can reliably study how civilizations develop (free from the influence of random chance). Then we evaluate how many of these civilizations had periods of strong corruption, loss in quality of life, and all the other negatives we're experiencing this decade.
My argument is: you'd find a correlation between these periods, and the relative amounts of wealth invested into politics. Note this doesn't imply that bigger sums of money must lead to victory - especially if the thesis mentioned in my first reply is correct, which I very much assume it is.
If not, I once again fail to see your point - sure, the issues I mentioned occur a lot in poorer countries, I never claimed otherwise! So I still can't see how this relates to my hypothesis.
Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.
But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.
The reality is that spending can keep a candidate from losing an election for dumb reasons (e.g. lack of name recognition), but it can't win an election by itself. There are plenty of examples of the bigger spender losing, both before and after Citizen's United.
^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
I'm with you, brother/sister.
The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice.
Infinitely more credible than either of our current parties at this point.
Why has the federal state accumulated $40T debt?
Interest on debt is already a double-digit percentage of spending, so the problem gets worse by itself.
And honestly: How many people in the US would actually change party only because of irresponsible spending? In my view, this is like priority number 4 at best for most people, and many at most moan about it instead of letting it drive their political choices. Political representatives also basically only ever throw it around as accusation against opponents, without ever actually doing better themselves (just consider the Trump-1 promise of getting rid of the debt during his first term: not even an attempt was made).
No surprise, they're (we're) humans after all.
When the shit hits the fan with The Great Depression II, we'll reset our priorities then.
What used do seem implausible is now accepted as normal, and tough luck if your income and wealth fell behind / didn’t keep pace.
the GOP is _still_ proclaiming itself to be the party of fiscal responsibility
I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008.
Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
The ebbing tide will lower all ships…
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen this time.
Of course this comes with its own set of gigantic issues, likely triple digit inflation and hardship to raise money for generations.
But US can't default really.
It could. We'd just reorganize and call the old debts part of "Old US". This is all "New US".
It operates under expectations - the more liquid the asset, the more likely you'll be OK with accepting it in the context of a trade. The discount is for illiquidity.
I'd love to see someone buy a TV with those bonds.
Debasement is far more painful - the treasury will simply choose not to come good on the obligations.
Credit worthiness is a must and you're talking about the savings and liquidity of all the world, us citizens, banks and institutions included.
There's a reason Germany and Italy can borrow lots of money at relatively low costs despite everything: no matter the economic crisis, no matter the inflation, no matter if the countries were in rubbles post not one, but two world wars, they always paid their debts.
I'm not sure how can you imagine that defaulting can be anywhere better than increasing inflation.
And the US in particular has the huge advantage of being able to mint the money to back it.
Some use gold or minerals. I wonder if this is what US does. Also this makes me think why every European countries are taking their gold reserves out of the us.
Debasement is the appropriate term.
I heard many Asian countries as selling US and buying Yen and Wuan as countermeasures for the possible devaluation of the USD and to guarantee trade. I understood that the threat of doing so slowed down things but it seems inevitable at this point that it accelerates.
I am not sure on what I am talking about. This is what I understood from the news. I would like to be corrected if I'm wrong though
As for selling dollar for other currencies, I am sure it makes sense to dump some of it because it seems to be a bit more volatile, holding another country's currency is exposing you more to their economy after all. I am not sure what that has to do with guaranteeing trade, maybe someone smarter can answer that, my understanding is that you hold a currency buffer so that if you need to trade in some currency you already have some of it so it flows nicely, but I can be completely wrong.
Most of the US government debt is owed to institution and people in the US. All these retirement funds, social security, health insurance, etc... that own part of the government debt... well, you won't get what you paid for.
This is a simplistic and partial view, but I think that's the most personal way of thinking about it.
Printing more money devalues the currency your retirement is priced in, so that’s not an escape either.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
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 who cuts the waste.
This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
That was just one proposal with half a trillion.
According to any of the reporting I can find, the Inflation Reduction Act: "This bill would raise $737 billion in revenue while spending $437 billion. The remaining $300 billion would go toward deficit reduction." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan#Inflati...
This is pretty much the same story with every major policy proposal from the Biden administration. They all included plans to cover the expected costs.
It's pretty pointless to compare individual bills though as they are usually packaged up with the whole goals of the administration. And, as expect, Democratic administrations are far more fiscally responsible and consistently propose packages and goals that reduce the deficit.
You seem to have conflated the infrastructure bill with the inflation reduction bill.
Notably, and tellingly, any purported debt reduction from the inflation bill was made irrelevant from the $300bn of extra debt from the infra bill.
Let me know when you have an actually relevant source.
You seem laser focused on one specific bill (presumably the one bill from the Biden admin you could find with a deficit) but again, federal policy is larger than that.
Clinton was also not a Democrat if you compare him to current Democrats. His admin was more right wing than the Trump administration. Clinton's crime bill, serious immigration crackdowns. I mean, Trump did partial criminal justice reform in his first term. That's the complete opposite of the Clinton crime bill, which skyrocketed incarceration.
Clinton's IIRAIRA bill laid out the blueprint currently being utilized for rapid deportations. In fact, 'expedited removal' is a core feature of the bill. Also, he architected the concept of administrative warrants currently being used by ICE for deportations.