Reminder that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is going to add, at minimum, 4 trillion in new debt. That’s per the CBO. And if he gets the additional funding increases he is seeking this year, he will add another 5 trillion over the next ten years. That’s 9 trillion before half his term is up.
That money will go to the Trump family, their friends, friendly businesses who get government contracts, etc. But the cost will fall on all Americans. In the end I don’t see a way out without hyperinflation, which is another way of saying - we will be poor to prop up oligarchs who have hoarded billions in dishonest ways.
But the administration is asking us to ignore what our eyes see and instead worry about some insignificant fraud that some Somalians allegedly perpetrated, even though it is tiny by comparison.
I just can't. Watching from Europe, what's happening in the US is what is jokingly referred as "clown world" on the internet, except this time there are real clowns everywhere. Like, how did it end up like this?
You have Trump as president who campaigned on reducing the US trade deficit and government deficit. It turns out there is a lot of fraud and to such an extent that it essentially makes the anti-immigrant sentiment look justified.
The US left cares about optics in a seemingly backwards way. They think exposing the fraud will justify racism and discrimination, so they deny that there ever was any fraud to begin with. This tacit approval makes them look like co-conspirators, which has worse optics than the bad optics they desperately were trying to get away from.
And yet despite these "heroic" attempts at cutting government spending and the mass scale fraud suddenly falling into the lap of republicans so that they can crack down on it, Trump has contributed absolutely nothing towards reducing the deficit. Instead, the deficit is growing so quickly Trump will be overtaking Biden when it comes to driving the country into debt.
I mean, as a citizen of the U.S., I'm about as confused as you are. Though, if I had to guess, a couple of things really came to a head to make this second term possible:
The establishment Democrats really screwed up on presenting a galvanizing candidate and sufficiently distancing themselves from Wall Street/Corporate interests. Trump may have lied his ass off at workers in swing states, but even though he had no intent/means to deliver half of what was promised, the man ended up telling people things were shit, while the Dems were still saying the experts were saying everything is the best it's ever been.
Once in Office, Trump has become much more dangerous due to actually having the architects of Project 2025 behind the scenes orchestrating things. He was "contained" by ineptitude in his first term, but a lot of power brokers all got behind getting behind someone sufficiently corrupt so as to make a major facelift of U.S. foreign and domestic policy tenable. And the worst part about it is that it's all been enabled by the cooperation of the Courts, and the Legislature not mustering the will to rein either of the other two Branches back onto some semblance of sanity.
I cannot say I have ever felt like I'm a stranger in a foreign land (in my own country of birth!), than I've been over the last two to three years. Don't know if this potential has always been festering under the surface, and I've just now hit the age where I can actually see it or what; but even my parents are flummoxed at the direction things have gone.
The threat of The Donald attacking Greenland has not yet passed.
If it happens, the economic fallout will be massive.. like 20-25% of GDP erased.
The activation of the 11th Airborne, as Malcom Nance indicated, is far too specialized for offensive Arctic warfare rather than domestic crowd control.
The activation may well be a negotiation bluff, but this new "concept of a framework" may also be a geopolitical feint to cover military operations. Such a military incursion itself would likely fail worse than The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Afghanistan combined. "Why is this?" you ask? Because Greenlanders are well-armed and practiced with tens of thousands of what are effectively sniper rifles. Facebook Marketplace has listed suppressed rifles with optics for the equivalent of $700 USD. The weather is extremely bad, there aren't many useable runways or deep water ports near Nuuk, there are no highways, and NATO already sent more reinforcements. And the US military has exactly one icebreaker. Doing so would ruin NATO, the US economy, and US relations with almost every country.
This will be inflated away. The FED is already not trying to hit the 2% target. Unfortunately the treasury is issuing mostly treasury bills, so debt servicing will just become more expensive triggering a spiral. This will trigger e.g. capital controls.
When fear mongering around the national debt occurs I feel inclined to encourage people to research modern monetary theory. I am not an economist but it's obvious that many cultural assumptions around how money works are either intentionally wrong or the residue of outdated thinking.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] threadThat money will go to the Trump family, their friends, friendly businesses who get government contracts, etc. But the cost will fall on all Americans. In the end I don’t see a way out without hyperinflation, which is another way of saying - we will be poor to prop up oligarchs who have hoarded billions in dishonest ways.
But the administration is asking us to ignore what our eyes see and instead worry about some insignificant fraud that some Somalians allegedly perpetrated, even though it is tiny by comparison.
You have Trump as president who campaigned on reducing the US trade deficit and government deficit. It turns out there is a lot of fraud and to such an extent that it essentially makes the anti-immigrant sentiment look justified.
The US left cares about optics in a seemingly backwards way. They think exposing the fraud will justify racism and discrimination, so they deny that there ever was any fraud to begin with. This tacit approval makes them look like co-conspirators, which has worse optics than the bad optics they desperately were trying to get away from.
And yet despite these "heroic" attempts at cutting government spending and the mass scale fraud suddenly falling into the lap of republicans so that they can crack down on it, Trump has contributed absolutely nothing towards reducing the deficit. Instead, the deficit is growing so quickly Trump will be overtaking Biden when it comes to driving the country into debt.
The establishment Democrats really screwed up on presenting a galvanizing candidate and sufficiently distancing themselves from Wall Street/Corporate interests. Trump may have lied his ass off at workers in swing states, but even though he had no intent/means to deliver half of what was promised, the man ended up telling people things were shit, while the Dems were still saying the experts were saying everything is the best it's ever been.
Once in Office, Trump has become much more dangerous due to actually having the architects of Project 2025 behind the scenes orchestrating things. He was "contained" by ineptitude in his first term, but a lot of power brokers all got behind getting behind someone sufficiently corrupt so as to make a major facelift of U.S. foreign and domestic policy tenable. And the worst part about it is that it's all been enabled by the cooperation of the Courts, and the Legislature not mustering the will to rein either of the other two Branches back onto some semblance of sanity.
I cannot say I have ever felt like I'm a stranger in a foreign land (in my own country of birth!), than I've been over the last two to three years. Don't know if this potential has always been festering under the surface, and I've just now hit the age where I can actually see it or what; but even my parents are flummoxed at the direction things have gone.
If it happens, the economic fallout will be massive.. like 20-25% of GDP erased.
The activation of the 11th Airborne, as Malcom Nance indicated, is far too specialized for offensive Arctic warfare rather than domestic crowd control.
The activation may well be a negotiation bluff, but this new "concept of a framework" may also be a geopolitical feint to cover military operations. Such a military incursion itself would likely fail worse than The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Afghanistan combined. "Why is this?" you ask? Because Greenlanders are well-armed and practiced with tens of thousands of what are effectively sniper rifles. Facebook Marketplace has listed suppressed rifles with optics for the equivalent of $700 USD. The weather is extremely bad, there aren't many useable runways or deep water ports near Nuuk, there are no highways, and NATO already sent more reinforcements. And the US military has exactly one icebreaker. Doing so would ruin NATO, the US economy, and US relations with almost every country.
This will be inflated away. The FED is already not trying to hit the 2% target. Unfortunately the treasury is issuing mostly treasury bills, so debt servicing will just become more expensive triggering a spiral. This will trigger e.g. capital controls.