Gift to Johns Hopkins. Why doesn’t the government do this.

We’ll introduce this short article with a few facts:

1. The U.S. federal government has infinitely more dollars than does Michael Bloomberg and the Bloomberg Philanthropies.

2. Unlike state/local taxes, which fund state/local spending, federal taxes do not fund federal spending.

The federal government creates new dollars, ad hoc, to fund all its spending.

3. When Bloomberg and/or his foundation give to any charity, this does not add as many growth dollars to the economy as federal spending.

(To the degree that charitable gifts reduce Bloomberg’s taxes, those dollars are not taken from the economy.)

4. America has a shortage of trained healthcare workers (See next:)

Staff Shortages Choking U.S. Health Care System, A growing shortage of health care workers is being called the nation’s top patient safety concern., By Steven Ross Johnson, July 28, 2022

The situation is quite serious and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Physician Shortage: The nation is facing a projected shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2033.

Nursing Shortage: There is an urgent need to hire at least 200,000 nurses each year to meet rising demands and replace retiring nurses. Among support personnel, a shortage of home health aides is most acute.

Overall Health Workforce: The health care industry employed 16.3 million people in 2022, making it the largest employment sector in the U.S.

Despite this, there is still a shortage, with a projected need for 1.1 million new registered nurses across the U.S. to address retirements and the growing demand.

Impact of COVID-19: An estimated 1.5 million health care jobs were lost in the first two months of the pandemic. Although many of those jobs have since returned, health care employment remains below pre-pandemic levels.

Patient Safety Concerns: Staffing shortages are now the nation’s top patient safety concern, leading to longer wait times and even patients being turned away in life-threatening emergencies.

This shortage is affecting various levels of healthcare provision, from hospitals to private practices, and is a major concern for the future of healthcare services in the country.

So, the title question is, Why Doesn’t the Federal Government Do This? (I’ll tell you the answer.)

Most Johns Hopkins Medical Students to Receive Free Tuition After $1 Billion Gift Story by Alyssa Lukpat

A majority of medical students at Johns Hopkins University are set to receive free tuition after the school received a $1 billion gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies, making Hopkins the latest medical school to go tuition free because of a large donation.

Hopkins said Monday that students from families earning under $300,000 would receive free tuition starting in the fall.

And, of course, free tuition isn’t enough for many families, so:

Students whose families earn as much as $175,000 will have their living expenses covered.

The school estimates nearly two-thirds of its students would qualify for either of the benefits.

A growing number of philanthropists and medical schools are pushing to make education free for aspiring doctors and reduce the financial barriers that can deter them.

Another financial barrier often is overlooked. Many families rely on their young people to quit school and get jobs to help support the family.

The federal government should pay students a salary so parents would not be tempted to dissuade students from attending college.

Buoyed by donations, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the medical schools at New York University and Columbia University have given their students free tuition or scholarships if they have financial need.

Also, Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine Waived all tuition and fees for students entering between the fall of 2020 and 2025.

Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western University offers full scholarships to all admitted students, to name a couple more.

The schools mentioned are all well-known and prestigious institutions within the United States. They have national and often international reputations for excellence in medical education and research.

Donors to such institutions tend to receive significant recognition for their contributions. America needs much more help than wealthy donors seeking applause can provide.

The cost of medical school has kept aspiring doctors out of the field, where they can graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

The student loan program is one of the most shortsighted, economically ignorant inventions the federal government ever has created.

It forces monetarily non-sovereign (meaning, limited dollars) students, to pay dollars to the Monetarily Sovereign (having unlimited dollars) federal government.

It’s a perfect plan if you want to discourage young people from attending college.

By offering financial freedom to more students, schools can give medical students the flexibility to choose jobs in important but lower-paying fields like internal medical and pediatrics.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic organization said Monday that the U.S. has a shortage of medical professionals yet the cost of attending school for these jobs is often too high.

“By reducing the financial barriers to these essential fields, we can free more students to pursue careers they’re passionate about,” he said.

Bloomberg has used his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, to donate billions to several causes including public health, the environment and improving city governments.

Hopkins said Bloomberg’s donation would also be used to expand financial aid for nursing and public-health graduate students, in addition to graduate students in other fields.

“This new scholarship formula will ensure the most talented aspiring doctors representing the broadest and deepest range of socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds have the opportunity to graduate debt-free,” Hopkins said.

No, it doesn’t assure that at all.

It assures the relative handful of aspiring doctors, who can afford not to have any income for the next few years, will be relieved of many college costs.

And as vital as healthcare is, what about all the other specialties that are short of practitioners?

Consider the serious shortage of engineers.

Every year, the US will need about 400,000 new engineers.

Yet the next-generation skill sets that those engineers will require are sorely lacking, presenting the alarming possibility that nearly one in three engineering roles will remain unfilled each year through at least 2030.

This persistent talent gap risks short-circuiting the progress of several essential industries.

It may also seriously inhibit various US government initiatives intended to boost the economy and US competitiveness, such as the 2022 Build Back Better Act (BBBA) and the 2022 Chips and Science Act.

We also are short of trained people in Information Technology (cybersecurity experts, data scientists, and software developers) and Teaching, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects and special education.

Of course, this doesn’t include our shortages in trades not ordinarily associated with colleges but still requiring training: Electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC technicians, truck drivers and logistics coordinators, agricultural workers, and skilled manufacturing workers who can operate complex machinery and robotics.

America relies on the private sector to pay for all this schooling and training.

Our state universities and colleges, for instance, are largely funded by the private sector, either through local and state taxes or private contributions and endowments.

All suffer from one common problem: Affordability.

1. Potential workers cannot afford to take the time and pay the costs involved in formalized training, whether in a college, university, or specialized school.

2. The private sector cannot afford to pay students and trainees for their time and costs involved in receiving training.

3. Schools and other training facilities cannot afford to provide their services without remuneration.

The federal government suffers no such limitations. It can:

1. Pay students salaries and personal expense allowances for attending schools and training facilities.

2. Remunerate students for their education and training costs

3. Remunerate educational and training facilities to provide their services without charge.

The private sector (which does not have unlimited funds) already does some of this—just not enough.

Sixty years ago, the company that employed me paid my tuition to Northwestern University for my MBA. They didn’t pay for my books, transportation, or time (night school), and I was locked into that company for the 3 years I attended, but it’s what a monetarily non-sovereign company chose to do.

The presumptive goal of government is to protect and improve people’s lives. Funding training and education is an important step in accomplishing that mission.

Why is funding left to the monetarily non-sovereign private sector?

Why are you forced to pay local taxes for grades K-12—taxes that, in most places, are insufficient to fund excellent schooling—when the Monetarily Sovereign federal government could easily fund higher teacher salaries and better facilities without charging you a penny in taxes?

Yes, it’s commendable that Mr. Bloomberg, in exchange for tax breaks and accolades, will provide a vanishingly tiny support for what the nation needs.

But why do we need to rely on the Bloombergs of the world when the money is there, waiting for the populace and our leaders to acknowledge its need and availability?

The tax breaks already demonstrate the government’s willingness and ability to fund about one-third of the support at Mr. Bloomberg’s whim.

There is no financial reason why the federal government cannot provide the entire nation with everything that Mr. Bloomberg provides to a select few.

What is the real reason it already is not happening? There are two reasons:

The ignorance of the populace who have been brainwashed into believing that federal finances are like personal finances, and can’t afford to fund what America needs.
The rich, who run America, do not want benefits that would narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

Ignorance is the most expensive thing we can buy, yet each day, we pay mightily for another dollop of ignorance and allow the federal government to cry, “Poor.”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Uninformed debate on “national government debt” and one informed voice.

Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan on the risk of recession — Alan Greenspan

The UK government, like the US government, is Monetarily Sovereign. It has the infinite ability to create its own sovereign currency.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.

“There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody.

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”

Other governments have this ability — the UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, the EU (though not its euro-using nations), China, etc. Not only can they create infinite amounts of their sovereign currency, but they are large enough to assure acceptance of, and demand for, their currencies. The currencies of the above-named nations are backed by the full faith and credit of those nations, so there always is demand.

(By contrast, if you decided to create and distribute “mybucks” as your sovereign currency, you, too, would be Monetarily Sovereign, but few, if any, people would want it because your full faith and credit do not support a widely used currency.)

Sadly, the leaders of those nations have been paid by the rich to pretend they are not Monetarily Sovereign and that their “debt” is not “sustainable.” The purpose of the bribe: To widen the Gap between the rich and the rest. In many posts on this blog, I have discussed the facts that:

U.S. “federal debt” is not federal, nor is it debt. It is deposits wholly owned by the depositors.
The U.S. federal government is infinitely able to pay any obligations denominated in dollars, and the federal “debt” is infinitely sustainable.
Creating dollars does not cause inflation. All inflations are caused by scarcities of critical goods and services, most often oil, food, and labor.
Federal deficits are necessary to grow the economy, necessary to prevent recessions and depressions, and necessary to cure recessions.

Lest you believe the U.S. is the only Monetarily Sovereign government that pretends it isn’t Monetarily Sovereign, I give you the following demonstration of economic ignorance from the UK:

Background UK public sector net debt, often referred to as ‘national debt’, currently stands at just under 100 per cent of GDP.

The UK’s growth outlook remains weak; quantitative easing has significantly increased the sensitivity of the UK’s debt to changes in short-term interest rates; and it is unclear whether the Government’s fiscal rule, as it relates to the national debt, is fit for purpose.

The committee’s inquiry will investigate whether the UK’s national debt is on a sustainable path; if not, what steps are required; and whether the Government’s fiscal rule regarding the national debt is meaningful.

There it is, the “sustainable” lie. Like the Monetarily Sovereign U.S. “debt,” the UK debt is infinitely sustainable.

Call for evidence The committee is seeking answers to the following questions:

1. What is meant by a “sustainable” national debt? Does the metric of debt as a percentage of GDP adequately capture sustainability?

Answer: No. The “debt”/GDP has no meaning with regard to a Monetarily Sovereign government’s ability to “sustain” its so-called “debt.”

2. The Government’s target is for public sector net debt (excluding the Bank of England) to be falling, as a percentage of GDP, by the fifth year of the OBR’s forecast. How meaningful is this target; and how does it inform an evaluation of the sustainability of our national debt?

Answer: The only way to decrease the “debt”/GDP ratio is to reduce deficit spending, a reduction that has repeatedly caused recessions.

3. How robust are the assumptions used by the Office for Budget Responsibility when forecasting our national debt?

Answer: Since the forecasts are meaningless, the “robustness” question also is meaningless.

4. What implications does the structure of the UK’s national debt have for its short and longer-term funding?

Answer: The debt is the net total of deficit spending, which already has been funded by money creation.

5. What are the market risks created by high levels of public debt; and what factors will influence the market’s appetite for this debt?

Answer: National government deficit spending adds growth dollars to the economy. The real market risks — i.e., recession and depression — come from insufficient deficit spending. The government does not need to sell deposits into so-called “debt.” So, there is no government need for “market appetite.” The UK government can spend endlessly without selling even one pound of debt securities.

6. If we are to ensure our national debt is sustainable, what might this mean for fiscal policy?

Answer: There is no need to “ensure’ the national debt is sustainable. It is infinitely sustainable. For that reason, paying higher interest on the “debt” is not a burden on the government Higher rates often can benefit the economy by adding dollars to the private sector, thus increasing GDP.

7. Should the definition of the national debt differentiate between debt incurred for investments (which generate revenue for the Government), and other areas of spending?

Answer: The so-called “national debt” is nothing like private (monetarily non-sovereign) debt. The more “national debt” there is, the healthier the economy. The UK government has no need for revenue. Even if it didn’t collect a pound in income or taxes, it could continue spending forever. And then there is this bit of nonsense:

Matthew Lynn

Britain is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. No one dares admit it Story by Matthew Lynn

Rishi Sunak came under fire for some Treasury forecasts of tax rises.

The Labour Party droned on about “change” while endlessly repeating some imaginary numbers about “investing” in the NHS and creating “green jobs”.

Over the course of the election campaign, the main parties have argued furiously about trivialities.

Yet there is an ugly truth lurking behind this election: Britain is far closer to bankruptcy than our political elites are willing to admit.

This is absolutely false scaremongering. The UK cannot go bankrupt because it cannot run short of money. Period.

Taxes are already at a 70-year high, and yet we are nowhere close to balancing the books.

Every pound of taxes reduces GDP growth. National taxes absolutely should be cut. They do not fund (monetary sovereign) national government spending. (Taxes do fund local — monetarily non-sovereign –government spending.) If the UK stops running deficits, it will have a depression that will make the Great Depression look like a picnic — a depression that only will be cured by massive deficit spending.

Over the course of this year, we will add another £87 billion, or around 3 per cent of GDP, to the national debt, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

And this is happening at a time when the economy is recovering, and the Government has pushed through a series of punishing tax rises.

Did it occur to the authors that GDP = National + local government spending + Net Exports? An economy recovers because of deficit spending, not in spite of it.

We should be paying back debt at this point in the cycle, not racking up even more.

“Paying back requires either more taxes or less spending, both of which will reduce GDP. It’s simple algebra.

Our debt to GDP ratio is close to 100 per cent, and tripled in the 16 years to 2023, according to the Resolution Foundation, the largest ever increase in peacetime.

We are very near to the 112 per cent level that has just led to the humiliating downgrade of France’s credit rating twice over the past six months.

The UK is Monetarily Sovereign. France is monetarily non-sovereign. Sadly, the authors don’t understand the difference, yet they write about economics. Shameful.

It doesn’t stop there. We are still racking up huge off-balance sheet debts. Such as? There is already £200 billion of outstanding student debt, and that is forecast to rise to over £400 billion by the 2040s.

Again, students are monetarily non-sovereign. The authors confuse the burden of private debt with the economic necessity of national debt, demonstrating unforgivable ignorance by national leaders. The government should increase its deficits by helping fund students’ debt.

Few believe that graduates will earn enough to pay back their loans in full, especially as our zero-growth economy is hardly creating any new professional jobs to absorb them all.

Government deficit spending could grow the economy and create jobs.

We are on the hook for some £2.6 trillion in “unfunded” public sector pension entitlements.

There are zero “unfunded” public sector pension entitlements. They all are funded by government money creation. The claim is an attempt to widen the income/wealth/power Gaps between the rich and the rest. The claim is funded by the rich to make themselves richer. The wider the Gaps, the richer are the wealthy.

As the state employs more and more people – we added another 135,000 to the government payroll in the year to September 2023 – that figure will carry on getting larger and larger.

That means 135,000 people receive money that is added to GDP.

We are legally mandated to hit a net zero target which the OBR has calculated could add at least another £300 billion to the government’s costs over three decades.

If a “net zero” target means zero deficits, the UK is headed for a depression. That target is beyond stupid. It is criminal.

In Wales, a staggering 28 per cent of working age people are now on benefits, depending on the state to support them, and the figures are little better in the rest of the country.

If “the state” is the national government, those payments add to GDP and do not cost anyone anything. And at last, we come to one Britisher who understands Monetary Sovereignty. Delight in reading one informed man’s comments:

Jon Camden

JON CAMDEN – WRITTEN EVIDENCE SND0005 – SUSTAINABILITY OF THE UK’S NATIONAL DEBT INQUIRY

The UK’s national debt is always sustainable.

I’m frankly amazed you have to ask this question. Firstly, a brief explanation as to what the National Debt actually is. The debt is nothing more than a record of all government expenditure into the economy less taxes removed from the economy.

The issuance of Gilts to match the difference between spending and tax is not borrowing and does not provision government. The sale/purchase of Gilts is an Open Market Operation with the purpose of managing interest rates, it is a hangover from the gold standard days.

Gilt sales serve no real purpose other than to provide a safe way for pension funds and other financial institutions to make money.

They also help control interest rates, but the point is correct. They do not provide the government with spending funds.

Not a bad thing in itself but let’s not pretend that our government, that is the monopoly issuer of the pound, needs to borrow pounds that it has already issued.

And what is the mechanism behind this simple fact? Reserves accounts of commercial financial institutions held at the Bank of England solely consist of pounds issued/spent by the government or loaned by the government.

The pounds in the reserve accounts of commercial institutions put there by our government are then used by commercial institutions to purchase Gilts issued by our government! In effect the pounds in the reserve account are transferred to a Gilts account which pays interest.

That’s it. There is no way that in any sense of the word could this be considered as the UK government borrowing.

Next, although we’ve just seen that the National Debt is a mirage and better described as savings, we still insist that we have to pay interest (often described as nothing more than corporate welfare) on the pounds we have issued.

And that is a lot of interest. How sustainable are these interest payments? The answer is infinitely sustainable.

As I’ve already stated the irrefutable fact that the UK government is the monopoly issuer of the pound. The UK government can never involuntarily become bankrupt.

It can never run out of pounds. It can therefore always service its ‘debt’ as long as the debt is in pounds (which of course it is).

You only have to look at the example of Japan to realise that debt to GDP ratios are totally meaningless.

Last time I looked, end of 2023, Japan had a debt to GDP of 263% with low inflation, low interest rates, high levels of employment and excellent public services.

Any debt to GDP target is completely arbitrary and designed to hold down the spending of public money for public purpose, in other words it is politically motivated rather than having any economic basis.

Last, just want to reiterate that the idea that the UK government is dependent on the private sector or market to finance its ‘debt’ is total nonsense.

As I’ve already stated the pounds used by private financial institutions to buy Gilts were already issued by the government but we still have to go through the theatre of pretence by selling Gilts on the primary market.

BoE just used to buy them directly until it was forbidden, but that is entirely self-impose constraint. Now, if the market loses its appetite for debt the BoE just steps in and buys on the secondary market.

It’s about time the law-makers of our country understood that the UK government is monetarily sovereign. UK government finances are not like a household’s.

The UK government can never go broke, can never run out of money, and can always sustain its debt.

That, however, is not to say there are no limits to government expenditure. UK government expenditure is constrained by the real resources that are available to buy priced in pounds.

Asking how we are going deploy our government’s infinite financial resources to invest to sustain the real economy, mobilise our workforce and the finite resources of our country and, at the same time, sustain the environment are the real questions we should be asking.

Not worrying about an imaginary problem about how to sustain an imaginary ‘debt’, caused by imaginary ‘borrowing’. 23 January 2024

Thank you, Professor Camden. We can now assure everyone that there is at least one informed, though lonesome, person in England. Is there another? Oh, wait. I think Camden is an American and a chemist. If that is the case, perhaps it shows that chemists rely on proofs and facts, while economists rely on intuition and hearsay. So, thank you again, Professor Jon Camden, for your excellent article. Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Historical claims the Federal Debt is a “ticking time bomb.” From Sept. 26, 1940, to June 21, 2024

This is an update of previous posts showing the seemingly never-ending warnings about “federal debt” (that isn’t federal and isn’t debt).

The Big Lie in economics is: “Federal taxes fund federal spending.” The truth is that federal taxes fund nothing. They are destroyed upon receipt by the Treasury.

The U.S. federal government is not like state/local governments, not like euro governments, not like businesses, and not like you and me.

It uniquely is Monetarily Sovereign. It cannot, unwillingly, run short of its own sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. As real experts have said:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”

Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. It’s not tax money… We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account.”

Statement from the St. Louis Fed: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.”

Press Conference: Mario Draghi, President of the Monetarily Sovereign ECB, 9 January 2014 Question: can the ECB ever run out of money? Mario Draghi: Technically, no. We cannot run out of money.

Because the U.S. federal government has the infinite ability to create its sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar, it never borrows dollars.

Contrary to popular wisdom, T-bills, T-notes, and T-bonds do not represent borrowing. They simply are deposits, the purpose of which is to provide a safe place to store unused dollars and to help the Fed control interest rates.

The government never touches those dollars, which remain the property of the depositors. Not only can our Monetarily Sovereign government not run short of dollars, but federal deficits are necessary to grow the economy, as evidenced by the formula: GDP = Federal Spending + Nonfederal Spending + Net Exports.

When we don’t have sufficient federal deficits, we have depressions and recessions:

U.S. depressions tend to come on the heels of federal surpluses.

1. 1. 1. 1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807.
    2. 1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819.
    3. 1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837.
    4. 1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857.
    5. 1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873.
    6. 1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893.
    7. 1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929.
    8. 1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.

Periodically, we publish yet another shrieking claim that the U.S. federal debt is “unsustainable” and a “ticking time bomb.”

This lie has been told to you every year (really, almost every day) since 1940, and that bomb has never exploded, nor will it.

Rather than repeat the entire list of the thousands of lies to which you have been subject, I will list samples here as a reference and add periodically, at the end, new “federal debt is a ticking time bomb“ lies as I encounter them.

Read these and see that even respected economists replace facts with intuition:

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September 26, 1940, New York Times: The federal budget was a “ticking time-bomb which can eventually destroy the American system,” said Robert M. Hanes, president of the American Bankers Association.

By 1983: “The debt probably will explode in the third quarter of 1984,” said Fred Napolitano, former National Association of Home Builders president.

In 1984: AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said. “It’s a time bomb ticking away.”

In 1985: “The federal deficit is a ticking time bomb, and it’s about to blow up,” U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. (Remember him?)

Later in 1985: Los Angeles Times: “We labeled the deficit a ‘ticking time bomb‘ that threatens to permanently undermine the strength and vitality of the American economy.”

In 1987: Richmond Times-Dispatch – Richmond, VA: “100TH CONGRESS FACING U.S. DEFICIT’ TIME BOMB‘”

Later in 1987: The Dallas Morning News: “A fiscal time bomb is slowly ticking that, if not defused, could explode into a financial crisis within the next few years for the federal government.”

In 1989: FORTUNE Magazine: “A TIME BOMB FOR U.S. TAXPAYERS“

In 1992: The Pantagraph – Bloomington, Illinois: “I have seen where politicians in Washington have expressed little or no concern about this ticking time bomb they have helped to create, that being the enormous federal budget deficit, approaching $4 trillion.“

Later in 1992, Ross Perot said, “Our great nation is sitting right on top of a ticking time bomb. We have a national debt of $4 trillion.”

In 1995: Kansas City Star: “Concerned citizens. . . regard the national debt as a ticking time bomb poised to explode with devastating consequences at some future date.”

In 2003: Porter Stansberry, for the Daily Reckoning: “Generation debt is a ticking time bomb . . . with about ten years left on the clock.”

In 2004: Bradenton Herald: “A NATION AT RISK: TWIN DEFICIT A TICKING TIME BOMB“

In 2005: Providence Journal: “Some lawmakers see the Medicare drug benefit for what it is: a ticking time bomb.”

In 2006: NewsMax.com, “We have to worry about the deficit . . . when we combine it with the trade deficit, we have a real ticking time bomb in our economy,” said Mrs. Clinton.

In 2007: USA Today: “Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen.“

In 2010: Heritage Foundation: “Why the National Debt is a Ticking Time Bomb. Interest rates on government bonds are virtually guaranteed to jump over the next few years.

In 2010: Reason Alert: “. . . the time bomb that’s ticking under the federal budget like a Guy Fawkes’ powder keg.”

In 2011: Washington Post, Lori Montgomery:”. . . defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode.”

June 19, 2013: Chamber of Commerce: Safety net spending is a ‘time bomb’, By Jim Tankersley: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is worried that not enough Americans are worried about social safety net spending. The nation’s largest business lobbying group launched a renewed effort Wednesday to reduce projected federal spending on safety-net programs, labeling them a “ticking time bomb” that, left unchanged, “will bankrupt this nation.”

On June 15, 2014: CBN News: “The United States of Debt: A Ticking Time Bomb“

On June 18, 2015: The ticking economic time bomb that presidential candidates are ignoring: Fortune Magazine, Shawn Tully,

On February 10, 2016, The Daily Bell: “Obama’s $4.1 Trillion Budget Is Latest Sign of America’s Looming Collapse”

On January 23, 2017: Trump’s ‘Debt Bomb‘: Deficit May Grow, Defense Budget May Not, By Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.

On January 27, 2017: America’s “debt bomb is going to explode.” That’s according to financial strategist Peter Schiff. Schiff said that while low interest rates had helped keep a lid on U.S. debt, it couldn’t be contained for much longer. Interest rates and inflation are rising, creditors will demand higher premiums, and the country is headed “off the edge of a cliff.”

On April 28, 2017: Debt in the U.S. Fuel for Growth or Ticking Time Bomb?, American Institute for Economic Research, by Max Gulker, PhD – Senior Research Fellow, Theodore Cangeros

February 16, 2018 America’s Debt Bomb By Andrew Soergel, Senior Reporter: Conservatives and deficit hawks are hurling criticism at Washington for deepening America’s debt hole.

April 18, 2018 By Alan Greenspan and John R. Kasich: “Time is running short, and America’s debt time bomb continues to tick.”

January 10, 2019, Unfunded Govt. Liabilities — Our Ticking Time Bomb. By Myra Adams, Tick, tick, tick goes the time bomb of national doom.

January 18, 2019; 2019 Is Gold’s Year To Shine (And The Ticking U.S. Debt Time-Bomb) By Gavin Wendt

April 10, 2019, The National Debt: America’s Ticking Time Bomb. TIL Journal. Entire nations can go bankrupt. One prominent example was the *nation of Greece which was threatened with insolvency a decade ago. Greece survived the economic crisis because the European Union and the IMF bailed the nation out.

July 11, 2019: National debt is a ‘ticking time bomb ‘: Sen. Mike Lee

SEP 12, 2019, Our national ticking time bomb, By BILL YEARGIN SPECIAL TO THE SUN SENTINEL | At some point, investors will become concerned about lending to a debt-riddled U.S., which will result in having to offer higher interest rates to attract the money. Even with rates low today, interest expense is the federal government’s third-highest expenditure following the elderly and military. The U.S. already borrows all the money it uses to pay its interest expense, sort of like a Ponzi scheme. Lack of investor confidence will only make this problem worse.

JANUARY 06, 2020, National debt is a time bomb, BY MARK MANSPERGER, Tri City Herald | The increase in the U.S. deficit last year was about $1.1 trillion, bringing our total national debt to more than $23 trillion! This fiscal year, the deficit is forecasted to be even higher, and when the economy eventually slows down, our annual deficits could be pushing $2 trillion a year! This is financial madness. there’s not going to be a drastic cut in federal expenditures — that is, until we go broke — nor are we going to “grow our way” out of this predicament. Therefore, to gain control of this looming debt, we’re going to have to raise taxes.

February 14, 2020, OMG! It’s February 14, 2020, and the national debt is still a ticking time bomb! The national debt: A ticking time bomb? America is “headed toward a crisis,” said Tiana Lowe in WashingonExaminer.com. The Treasury Department reported last week that the federal deficit swelled to more than $1 trillion in 2019 for the first time since 2012. Even more alarming was the report from the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicting that $1 trillion deficits will continue for the next 10 years, eventually reaching $1.7 trillion in 2030

April 26, 2020, ‘Catastrophic’: Why government debt is a ticking time bomb, Stephen Koukoulas, Yahoo Finance [Re. Monetarily Sovereign Australia’s debt.]

August 29, 2020, LOS ANGELES, California: America’s mountain of debt is a ticking time bomb The United States not only looks ill, but also dead broke. To offset the pandemic-induced “Great Cessation,” the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress have marshalled staggering sums of stimulus spending out of fear that the economy would otherwise plunge to 1930s soup kitchen levels. Assuming that America eventually defeats COVID-19 and does not devolve into a Terminator-like dystopia, how will it avoid the approaching fiscal cliff and national bankruptcy?

April 16, 2021, NATIONAL POLICY: ECONOMY AND TAXES / MARK ALEXANDER / The National Debt Clock: A Ticking Time Bomb: At the moment, our national debt exceeds $28 TRILLION — about 80% held as public debt and the rest as intragovernmental debt. That is $225,000 per taxpayer. Federal annual spending this year is almost $8 trillion, and more than half of that is deficit spending — piling on the national debt.

June 17, 2022 Time Bomb On National Debt Is Counting Down Faster Thanks To Fed’s Rate Hike, Tim Brown /We are now staring down the barrel of the end of the U.S. economy based on fiat money, printed out of thin air but charged back to the people at ridiculous interest rates.

Now, the national debt is approaching $31 trillion, which is $12 trillion more than when Donald Trump took office in 2017 and more than half of that debt was tacked on in his final year. Then we’ve had the disastrous year and a half of Joe Biden.

Now, the Fed is now hiking its rates and that spells even more trouble for the national debt and the economy at large.

December 4, 2022 America’s ticking time bomb: $66 trillion in debt that could crash the economy By Stephen Moore, The national debt is $31 trillion when including Social Security’s and Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. Wake up, America.

That ticking sound you’re hearing is the American debt time bomb that with each passing day is getting precariously close to detonating and crashing the US economy.

January 13, 2023. A ticking time bomb in the U.S. economy is running perilously close to detonation. Long considered a harbinger of bad luck, Friday, Jan. 13 came with a warning for Congress that the country could default on its debt as soon as June.

With the U.S. reaching its debt limit of $31.4 trillion on Jan. 19, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to increase or suspend the debt ceiling.

February 5 2023 ‘The world’s largest Ponzi scheme’: Peter Schiff just blasted the US debt ceiling drama. Here are 3 assets he trusts amid major market uncertainty Story by Bethan Moorcraft, A ticking time bomb in the U.S. economy is running perilously close to detonation. With the U.S. reaching its debt limit of $31.4 trillion on Jan. 19, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to increase or suspend the debt ceiling.

April 22, 2023 The Debt Ceiling Debate Is About More Than Debt, Jim Tankersley, WASHINGTON — Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California has repeatedly said that he and his fellow House Republicans are refusing to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, and risking economic catastrophe, to force a reckoning on America’s $31 trillion national debt. “Without exaggeration, America’s debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” he said this week.

November 3, 2023 The Fuse on America’s Debt Bomb Just Got Shorter, J Antoni Heritage Organization. The Treasury is now on track to borrow almost as much in just six months as it did in the previous 12 months. That’s nearly a doubling of the deficit. Because the federal debt is $33.7 trillion, just a 1 percent increase in yields adds $337 billion to the annual cost of servicing the debt over time. Absent spending reform, eventually no one will be willing to hold the bomb anymore, and the yields on U.S. debt will begin to resemble those in Argentina.

February 2, 2024 How Florida can help defuse the nation’s debt bomb By BARRY W. POULSON, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder and DAVID M. WALKER, former comptroller general of the United States. Washington’s out-of-control spending, combined with fiscal and monetary policies have resulted in trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits, over $34 trillion in federal debt, over $125 trillion in total federal liabilities and unfunded obligations, and excess inflation. Excessive spending and loose monetary policy increase inflation in the short term, and mounting debt burdens serve to reduce future economic growth and shift the economic burden and consequences of mounting debt burdens to future generations.

February 8, 2024 Legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones says a ‘debt bomb’ is about to go off in the U.S.: ‘We’re fast-pouring consumption like crazy’. The U.S. economy may seem like it’s firing on all cylinders, but underneath the surface, a “debt bomb” could be on the verge of exploding, according to billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones. The esteemed investor said in an interview with CNBC that he couldn’t deny the economy was strong, but that it was actually “on steroids” due to massive government spending and borrowing.

Jones is not the only one to call attention to the growing deficit issue in the U.S. On Sunday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell took a rare dive into politics, telling CBS’s 60 Minutes that the national debt was “growing faster than the economy,” and calling for lawmakers to get the federal government “back on a sustainable fiscal path.” Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said she is not yet worried about the increasing national debt as long as the government keeps in check the net payments it makes on its debt relative to GDP.

Those payments are projected to rise from 2.5% last year to 2.9% next year, according to the Office of Management and Budget—below their level in the early 1990s. Jones told CNBC that the strong economy could postpone the effects of the government’s deficit spending, but only for a little while. “The only question is … when does that manifest itself in markets?” he added.

“It could be this year, it could be next year. Productivity may mask and it might be three or four years from now. But clearly, clearly we’re on an unsustainable path.”

June 21, 2024 My Weekly Column: Our debt crisis is a ticking time bomb by Randy Feenstra: On June 18th, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – the government agency tasked with monitoring our nation’s fiscal health – confirmed my serious concerns with President Biden’s reckless spending agenda.

His administration’s fiscal policies have not only caused cumulative inflation to skyrocket by over 20% since he took office, but they have also accelerated our accumulation of debt to levels that are beyond unsustainable. Instead of changing course, he recently released his budget for Fiscal Year 2025, which has a $ 7.3 trillion price tag and looks to raise taxes on our families, farmers, and businesses to the tune of $5.5 trillion.

The CBO estimates that his debt “cancelation” policies will cost taxpayers nearly $400 billion over the next ten years. I strongly oppose these bailouts. Iowans who never attended college entered the workforce early or helped put their kids through school should not be forced to pick up the tab for President Biden’s costly and unfair executive orders.

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The latest installment contains the same old lies (“unsustainable,” “cost taxpayers” 0they’ve been telling since 1940.

They have been wrong for all those years. If we wait long enough, something will happen to prove them right, perhaps in a thousand years?

Today, this makes “only” 84 years of the debt nuts be ignorant.

The federal deficit yields economic growth year after year. When deficits are insufficient, we have had recessions, which were cured by increased deficits.

**When deficits decline, we have recessions (vertical gray bars), which are cured by increased deficits.**

If respected economists keep predicting something terrible is imminent year after year, yet exactly the opposite happens, at what point do they reexamine their beliefs?

At what point does the public say, “Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me repeatedly for 84 years; shame on me”?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

A Libertarian tells “the truth” about federal debt.

What follows is an article by a Libertarian, interspersed with a few whiffs of reality.

The national debt is over $34 trillion. It’s time to tell the truth about the U.S. government’s finances Story by Libertarian Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Yes, Mr. Vargas Llosa, it is time to tell the truth about government finances. Some might say, “Well, past time. Sadly, your article does not do it. The purpose of government financing is not to give the government more money. Because the U.S. federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, it already has infinite money.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. It’s not tax money… We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account.“

The purpose of the federal government — any government, in fact — is to improve the lives of the people. One measure of the improvement is Gross Domestic Product, the total amount of spending in an economy. Here is what federal deficit spending has done to Gross Domestic Product.

As deficit spending increasingly adds dollars to the economy, the economy grows.

While the self-proclaimed “truth-tellers” complain about federal deficits and debt (red), America’s Gross Domestic Product (blue) has risen enormously. “Ah,” they say, “but all that “money printing” has caused inflation, so Americans really are poorer now.” I call the “truth-tellers” attention to the following graph.

Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP **per person** has risen enormously for the past 90 years.

That graph shows that the average American is wealthier today than at any time in history. Federal deficit spending enriches Americans. But—and it’s a big “but”— averages don’t tell the full story because of the income/wealth/power Gap, You can read more about that at the link.

If anyone living in the United States in the decades immediately after the Second World War had predicted the self-inflicted financial mess the U.S. government now finds itself in, nobody would have taken that person seriously.

A normal human would say that a “financial mess” is a situation in which a person has difficulty paying his/her financial obligations. But as Messrs. Greenspan and Bernanke explain, the Monetarily Sovereign U.S. government has no such difficulty. It pays all its financial obligations simply by creating more dollars. So what does Mr. Vargas Llosa mean by “financial mess“? Nowhere in his article does he explain. Typical for “debt- truth tellers” who use frightening words to deceive.

For most of American history, until the mid-1970s, annual federal spending and revenue were roughly in balance—the exceptions being in wartime.

Contrast that with the federal deficit in fiscal year 2023, which topped $1.7 trillion, an amount larger than Mexico’s total economy (the 12th largest in the world).

It exceeded $1 trillion again in the first eight months of the current fiscal year and, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest forecast, released on June 18, will approach $2 trillion by the end of fiscal 2024.

Translation: In 2023, the federal government pumped 1.7 trillion growth dollars into the economy. In the first eight months of the current fiscal year, it pumped another 1 trillion growth dollars into the economy and expects to pump 2 trillion growth dollars into the economy by the end of fiscal 2024. These are dollars that go into the pockets of Americans at no cost to anyone — not to you, not to your friends and family, not to your neighbors. Why? Because federal taxes don’t fund federal spending. Even if federal tax collections totaled $0, the federal government could continue spending forever. The Monetarily Sovereign U.S. federal government neither needs nor uses income. (It is different for state and local governments, businesses, and euro governments, all of which are monetarily non-sovereign, and they do need and use income to fund spending.) The U.S. federal government destroys all the income it receives. Paying creditors is the primary process by which the federal government creates dollars. To pay a creditor, the federal government first creates instructions (checks, wires, etc.) instructing the creditor’s bank to increase the balance in the creditor’s checking account. The instant the creditor’s bank obeys those instructions, new dollars are added to the creditor’s checking account and to the M2 money supply measure. Those dollars are not deducted from the M2 money supply. The bank clears those instructions through the Federal Reserve. Thus the federal government approves its own instructions, which is why it never can run short of dollars. By contrast, when a local government sends instructions, M2 dollars are deducted from the local government’s checking account in a bank and added to a creditor’s bank account. No net dollars are created. They merely are transferred. Not understanding the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty marks one as ignorant about economics.

This has fueled a massive increase in the federal debt, which now totals $34 trillion, about $6 trillion more than America’s gross domestic product (GDP), the value of all the goods and services produced by America’s 330 million residents in a year.

If we count Social Security and Medicare liabilities, total debt is several times larger than GDP.

The debt/GDP ratio is meaningless. Those who quote it hope to scare you with irrelevant numbers. Federal debt is not a burden on the government or on taxpayers. It is nothing like private sector debt. Neither you nor anyone else pays for the federal debt—never has, never will. The so-called “debt” is nothing more than dollars deposited into T-security accounts. The contents of these accounts are wholly owned by the depositors and never used by the federal government. The purpose of T-accounts is not to provide spending money to the government. The purpose is to stabilize the dollar by:

Providing a storage place for unused dollars that is safer than any private bank account.
To help the Fed control interest rates by providing a “floor” rate.

Upon request by the owners, the dollars in T- accounts are transferred back to their owners. This is not a financial burden on the federal government, and no tax dollars are involved.

The consequences are sobering. Politicians like to use euphemisms to describe what they’re doing. Government spending, in the current vernacular, is referred to as “investment.”

Government spending, however, crowds out investment, which explains why private investment, the equivalent of 4.8% of GDP, is 30% lower than in 2000.

Government spending is more properly termed “investments,” not “debt. The economy doesn’t care where he investments come from. In fact, federal spending creates new growth dollars, while private investment only moves existing dollars. The “truth tellers” prefer the government to reduce its spending under the false narrative that this somehow will grow the economy. But:

GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports.

I have yet to communicate with a debt “truth-teller” who can explain the math of how cuts to federal spending will increase GDP.

At the same time, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, a reflection of both the federal government’s finances and the Federal Reserve’s money printing, also is down: by more than 50% since 2000.

That’s called “inflation,” and as we have seen, the economy has enjoyed real (inflation-adjusted) growth.

As a result of this economic mismanagement, the U.S. government will pay close to $900 billion this year just in interest payments on the national debt—and, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, which assume an idyllic scenario of no major wars, no recessions, and no financial crises, debt service will steadily increase to some $5.3 trillion by 2054.

Translation: This year, at no cost to anyone, the government will pump 900 billion growth dollars into the economy in interest payments alone. In 2054, the government will pump 5.3 trillion growth dollars into the economy — also at no cost to anyone. Most of those dollars will go into the pockets of the American people.

It was hard enough sustaining a debt that stood at 106% of GDP during WWII, when the country’s savings rate was 24%, but sustaining a much higher level of indebtedness with today’s 3% savings rate defies the imagination.

Oh, Mr. Vargas Llosa, I’ll bet you’re not even trying to use your imagination. The only difficulty in “sustaining” the debt came from being on a gold standard, which limited the government’s ability to create dollars. But Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971 (Roosevelt did it for domestic us in 1933), and since then the federal government has had the infinite ability to “sustain” any level of deficit spending. It never can run short of dollars. Private savings and the debt/GDP ratio are irrelevant to the government’s ability to “sustain.” but one must assume Mr. Vargas Llosa tosses in those numbers for fear effect, not because they make any sense whatsoever.

This catastrophe has been a long time in the making. In 1993, for instance, the annual deficit amounted to 3.8% of GDP, and the debt, which seemed astronomically high at a “mere” $4.4 trillion, was Lilliputian by today’s standards.

The U.S.’s real GDP was approximately $7.1 trillion in 1993. In 2023, it increased to approximately $21.6 trillion. And this is a “catastrophe”?? One hopes we continue to have “catastrophes” like that.

The trend goes back longer than that. The growth of the U.S. government in modern times is the story of post-WWII America.

President Dwight Eisenhower seems to have been the last guy in the post-WWII era who understood that the welfare state, the warfare state, and tax cuts not backed by tough spending cuts are incompatible with fiscally responsible government, or at least with reasonably-sized government.

During Eisenhower’s term, we suffered, not one, not two, but three recessions. One, called the “Eisenhower Recession,” occurred between 1957 and 1958. We had a sharp contraction in economic activity, high unemployment, and a decline in industrial production. Is that an example of “fiscal responsibility?”

The “wonderful” Eisenhower years. **Three recessions**. When federal deficit spending declined, GDP declined into recessions,

The 1953-54 recession was caused by the reduced deficit spending for the Korean War. This is a regular pattern: Reduced deficit spending leads to a recession, which is cured by increased deficit spending. See below.

A. Economic growth = B. Federal deficit growth + C. private sector spending. Cut B and C, and A declines into recession. Simple math.

The reason for the pattern is clear. Reduced deficit spending adds fewer growth dollars to the economy, so the economy sinks into recession. Curing the recession requires increased growth dollars.

Between 1950 and 1970, total debt (including government, household, corporate, and financial) was stable at about 150% of GDP. After Nixon did away with what was left of the gold standard in 1971, it was off to the races. Since then, total debt has grown by nearly 5,600%, more than double the U.S. economic growth rate.

This is another sleight-of-hand debt/GDP comparison that is meaningless. Nothing can be learned from comparing federal debt (i.e., the net cumulative total of deposits into Treasury Security accounts) vs. GDP (the total of all government and private spending in any given year). They are akin to comparing tons of butter eaten in the past 10 years with the number of butterflies born this year. Totally meaningless. If you don’t believe me, see Debt To GDP Ratio By Country. Scroll down to the middle of the page, where you will see every nation’s Debt/GDP ratio, from the highest (Japan) to tied for the lowest (Taiwan and several others). Look at those ratios, and you will see they tell you nothing about a nation’s ability to pay its bills.

There was a time, even in the middle of the Cold War, when government leaders, despite their international responsibilities and the onerous legacy of the New Deal and Great Society that nobody dared reverse, understood the need for fiscal discipline and containing the growth of government.

And there it is: The Libertarian belief in an “onerous legacy” of programs designed to aid middle and lower-income groups. That is the “onerous legacy” that gave us Social Security, Medicare, the War on Poverty, the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Economic Opportunity Act, a Job Corps for disadvantaged individuals, established work-study programs and community action initiatives, provided health insurance for elderly Americans, improving access to medical care, legislation addressing environmental concerns and conservation efforts, supported education, and Civil Rights Laws, focused on reducing racial injustice and promoting equality. Is it any wonder that a right-wing Libertarian should consider those “onerous?” After all, they cost dollars the government creates at the touch of a computer key, and much to Libertarian dismay, narrow the Gap between the rich and the rest.

The 12 years under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush averaged a 4% deficit due to defense spending increases, abandonment of domestic restraint—a legacy of Johnson’s “bread and butter” years and the Nixon-Ford presidencies’ about-face on most of the economic principles they previously had espoused—and the unfunded tax cuts influenced by Arthur Laffer’s notion that tax cuts would pay for themselves.

Oh, yes, cut defense spending to weaken the military at a time when we are the last hope for democracy. And eliminate the “bread and butter” for the poor and disadvantaged. Perfect. And then there were the “unfunded tax cuts,” which is an oxymoron. Taxes need to be funded by the people. No one needs to fund tax cuts. They don’t need to be paid for, and the government doesn’t need or use taxes. In fact, it destroys all tax dollars it receives.

The new millennium distorted matters even further, with the annual deficit from 2002 to 2023 averaging 5% over the two decades, 20% higher than nominal economic growth, which averaged 4.2%.

And yet again he mentions the meaningless debt/GDP ratio. It never ends for the Libertarians.

President Obama, under whom the deficit was double the Congressional Budget Office’s original projections, got the spending spree started, with Presidents Trump and Biden taking it to new levels.

And the economy grew massively.

It’s now come down to this. Unless a new generation of leaders has the courage to cut such “untouchables” as the defense, education, justice, and homeland security budgets, and privatize the Social Security program (as more than 40 countries wisely have done), sooner or later, the current trajectory of federal finances will lead to an extremely ugly place.

The above is a perfect description of the effort to widen the Gap between the rich and the rest, while weakening our economy and our national defense.

If you think things are bad now, just wait.

If we ever elect a right-wing, Libertarian fool to be President, along with our current, right-wing SCOTUS, and right-wing governors, things can get much worse. Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

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