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While former president Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris argue over who should get credit for a gimmick tax “cut,” the financial future of the American Republic is bleaker than it has ever been.
I addressed the looming catastrophe again last month, reminding our audience that this media outlet has been “sounding the alarm on this issue ever since its inception.”
“Within a decade, America will be staring down between $800 billion and $1 trillion in annual interest payments on its debt,” I noted in a column addressing this issue published back in June … of 2013.
Well guess what…
According to the latest figures from the U.S. Treasury, last month was yet another mile marker on the road to our Republic’s insolvency. Per the agency’s calculations (.pdf), America brought in $330 billion in receipts during the month of July – but spent a whopping $574 billion. For those of you mathematically challenged (like our politicians in Washington, D.C.), that’s a deficit of $244 billion.
Take a look…
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July’s spending binge was higher than June’s $537.2 billion – and significantly higher than the $496.9 billion the federal government spent last July. What’s that they say, though? “A few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there…”
Sooner or later it adds up to real money, right?
For the fiscal year, receipts have totaled nearly $4.1 trillion with outlays of $5.6 trillion – for a deficit of $1.5 trillion.
Here’s a look at those categories…
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With two months remaining in the federal fiscal year – which runs through the end of September – the current tidal wave red ink is already the fourth highest yearly deficit on record. Meanwhile the moving six-month average of monthly spending – $581 billion – is the highest it’s been since August 2021.
Worth noting? During July, interest payments on our nation’s stratospheric $35.16 trillion debt totaled $81 billion – putting the year-to-date total at $763 billion.
That’s right… last month alone, the federal government spent $81 billion on the cost of its profligate borrowing.
“How is this possible?” our friends at Zero Hedge noted. “How can the United States, which is now $35 trillion in the hole, justify this kind of irresponsible, profligate spending? The only possible answer for why this level of explosive deficit (and debt) growth continues, is the administration’s ongoing attempts to buy as many votes as possible, as well as the relentless increase in interest on the (federal) debt.”
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Not to give Trump a hall pass, the website added “neither presidential candidate has any plan or clue how to normalize the trend which assures fiscal collapse for the United States.”
As I wrote last month, “for years, the national debt has been a massive – yet distant – problem.”
“It was something for future generations to worry about, and so sadly – during the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s – generations of politicians of both parties simply refused to worry about it,” I added. “Republican and Democrat alike, they continued to spend with reckless abandon.”
Both parties own this problem… and both 2024 campaigns, sadly, are part of the problem.
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THE STATEMENT…
(U.S. Treasury)
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the owner and founding editor of FITSNews. Prior to founding his own news outlet, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina, bass guitarist in an alternative rock band and bouncer at a Columbia, S.C. dive bar. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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4 comments
The why is simple, irresponsible tax cuts for Corporations that were already making record profits which then used those tax savings for stock buybacks not to stimulate the economy, multimillionaires and billionaires paying a lower percentage of their income in taxes than middle and upper middle-income Americans, and a Republican party who has always wanted to kill Social Security, so they don’t want to fix the problem by increasing the taxable wage base and increasing taxes.
Americans are paying low taxes. We have an aging population that needs SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. We have failed to plan, not because we did not anticipate the problem, but because one of our Parties, (GOP) wants the chaos of deficits and fear of loss of SS to force a restructuring of our system in a way that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the middle. They want to kill Social Security and Medicare and turn it into private plans so that Wall Street and the Insurance industry can make more money. They always have. As an additional benefit, workers who don’t make enough to save will be totally depending on their employers and that will give employers more power over their lives. Just like Donald and Elon laughing about firing employees to threaten to organize or strike.
Conservatives always talk about deficits and the national debt but never raise an eyebrow as to why Republicans make deficits worse every time they obtain power, who benefits from that borrowed spending, etc. Just the fact alone that most tax dollars saved, most spending cut, most money borrowed really isn’t done for any working class person, and the effects it is designed to produce in the future most certainly will not benefit us either.
The sad truth is that even if we obliterated Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. and let our infrastructure crumble into dust, they would still be pumping billions more into the military industrial complex, still be pumping billions in subsidies to corporations, still be cutting taxes on the wealthy, to the point that we would still be running deficits. This is the system working as designed.
The lesson that anticapitalists try to get across is, you can’t trust these people to run anything. They don’t care about you, at all. You can’t sacrifice enough for them. There is no magical number that, once reached, they’ll finally be satisfied and relinquish the chains on society. You are going to have to see what they are doing for what it really is, and fight against it. It will continue on relentlessly until you do.
Typical Democrat talking points. How about the trillions and trillions Democrats proposed( and Supreme Court denied) to forgive student debt. Clearly to get votes and another irresponsible giveaway program.
Student loans are essentially debt slavery borne from a complete and utter mismanagement (and sabotage) of public higher education at all levels – administration, funding, what public unis focus their resources on instead of educating people, etc. If you want an example, look at USC and all of the construction projects and whatnot over the last 20 years.
You can tell yourself that student loans are “just the individual’s problem” except that it has crippled entire generations from living a life similar to their parents, and will do worse than cripple future generations as we still have done nothing to fix it. Home ownership is a pipe dream for most young people. Couples are deciding against having children. Retirement is a fleeting notion for most. That stems from multiple factors, but student loans put an additional barrier to them all.
Society failed college students. Failed them for decades, and will fail them for decades more the longer we are apathetic to it.
Another $2 trillion on the national debt pales in comparison to the above, but certainly $2 trillion in debt forgiveness doesn’t fix what created the $2 trillion in the first place.