There's nothing particularly special about the debt being larger than GDP. GDP is not income and debt is paid over time. For context, China has a Government Debt to GDP ratio of 96%, the UK is at 94%, France at 116%, Japan is at 263%.
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Roman emperors starting with Marcus Aurelius began devaluing their currency to pay for endless
war, and to a lesser
extent, free bread; i believe that is the principle cause of the decline of Roman empire.
It is more of the endless civil wars they had. See the Crisis of the Third Century when every military regional commander revolted and marched on Rome. Even during times of peace e.g., during Augustus time, they would pass laws trying to stop people from amputating their son's thumbs to avoid conscription.
Empire is a structure that exist strangely disconnected from the country that spawned it to keep the lights at the cost of other countries.
Just imagine if the us empire and its institutions, war machine parted ways with the country and its population. It would not be as hard as one imagines, but would reveal a country that has benefitted in parts by snuggling up to the imperial maxhine, while other paets where abandoned. It would also reveal how deeply the empire structure seeped into the privat social landscape.
> Just imagine if the us empire and its institutions, war machine parted ways with the country and its population.
I suspect we may not have to imagine this for long. The DOGEing of the federal government pulled a lot of the benefits of the union away from the people, and the recent political maneuvering around voting districts and other inter-state power contests suggest that the notion of the US as one nation and one people with a shared set of values is increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground. We have the most powerful military in the world (probably?), but in terms of the domestic situation, the federalized model is under incredible stress and the bargains that held it together seem to be failing or being intentionally broken. Your description of the empire leaving the country behind - or vice versa - feels less far-fetched than it would have a generation ago.
Well they lowered taxes on the richest (reduced income) and have increased spending (defense, ICE, ballrooms, what have you). So, exactly as predicted.
Deficit spending is one place where the major parties are in complete agreement. So it just wastes political capital, unless you see Thomas Massie somehow amassing a majority of Congressmen interested in his issues.
It also doesn’t appear on the ALL CAPS list of campaign priorities: https://rncplatform.donaldjtrump.com/. The word “debt” doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. And the word “deficit” appears just once in the context of the trade deficit.
Trump was the first candidate to release a list of itemized priorities in small words and ALL CAPS so the average dumbass could understand. There are many, many things you can say about this list. But it’s very hard to inject ambiguity into what he was running on.
Kushner is neck deep in Saudi money, Trump is taking plane-bribes from the Qataris, and their crypto schemes pave an open road into their wallets… obviously the problem is Zionists.
Pay no attention to who has oil, how American oil interests — much less obvious ones as ancient as Bushes and Cheney — shape policy, forget the size of the economies or how many billionaires are in each category, openly splashing cash at POTUS. Numbers, boo.
Forget 9/11, do not look at Afghanistan the US was never there, ignore bribes from regional powers. Zionism is the real threat.
You see, The Elders from the malaria ridden unwanted leftover chunks of Jordan’s immaculate creation are pulling the strings of Great Satan. They do it through ‘elite donors’, donors so elite the Heritage Foundation has taken over an entire branch of the American government and in parallel obfuscated foreign funding to “elite” Universities has plagiarist anti-semites with deplorable ideologies smirking in Congress while explaining why The Intifada needs to be more present in American cities and schools. Natural conclusions of The Zionist plot. o_o
The interesting thing about name calling is that where attention is being pointed away from is often more important than the target. Logs and splinters… you know, from that Bible people used to pretend to have read, about an uppity Jew.
Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison gave Trump hundreds of millions during his campaign to ensure this war happened.
Netanyahu visited Trump 7 times leading up to this war in Iran.
Every geopolitical expert on this topic has weighed in on it concluding it was obviously a move that only benefits Israel and weakens the US on the global stage.
There were 2 checks on Israel’s power in the Middle East: Iraq and Iran.
It is no coincidence that the USA has invaded both.
After Iran falls, Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. They have ambitions to dominate the entire region, including Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Egypt. Just Google “greater Israel project”.
America can’t solve this problem democratically. Trump has taught the GOP you can win elections through targeted bribery (e.g. No Taxes on Tips), avoiding hard decisions (e.g. no cuts to entitlements), and distracting people with expensive spectacle. Meanwhile, Democrats are a collection of interest groups held together by patronage. In the recent election, Democrats were knee-capped because inflation made it impossible to promise expensive new programs. With expanding benefits off the table as a carrot, Trump was able to make big gains among Democrat groups (e.g. Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens, Muslim immigrants in Michigan) that lean more conservative on issues other than government welfare.
That leaves everyone dealing in fictions: the fiction that you can reduce debt by cutting taxes, the fiction you can reduce debt by increasing spending, and fictions about how much you really balance the books by targeting only “billionaires” instead of taxing the middle class.
The only problem that exists is spending too much money. They could fix this overnight if people were willing to give up public entitlements and healthcare support. But they aren’t willing to so the US will eventually see hyper inflation or less likely bankruptcy
No, you can also raise taxes. The deficit is 4% of GDP. If we raised taxes by 4% of GDP, we'd still be less than the OECD average. We'd be the same as Australia, which is the second lowest-tax Anglosphere country.
We are spending 3 trillion extra dollars than we take in taxes per year. That means taxes would go up by 75 percent. Even then it doesn’t matter because we will spend even more. Everyone agrees to spend, no one agrees to cut
I must have been looking at old data, but it looks like $1.9 trillion in FY2026. So that's 6.5% of GDP rather than 4% like I said above. Taxes as a percentage of GDP is currently about 25%, so going up to 31.5% would be a 26% jump. Not great, but not catastrophic.
But I agree that if we raised taxes we would just spend more. :(
If taxes are raised then the people have to pay for the services, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do. That is the whole appeal of having those services — that they are, for all intents and purposes, free.
I mean this is the problem with half a century of global-hegemony-fueled debt binging. We could balance the budget our taxes would still be $2.7 trillion lower than what they would be if we were at the EU average.
That would be irrational. Even the UK and France spend 2% of GDP on defense, and they live under America's shield. Cutting our spending down to their level would save $400 billion/year. That's not peanuts, but that's only 1/3 of the deficit.
Having sufficient capacity for violence is indispensable for the existence of a state. You need a military so you can kill people in other countries, and you need police so you can maintain an internal monopoly on violence. You can't have state-funded preschool if you don't have a state. The Ukrainians unfortunately are learning this the hard way right now.
Re: "You can't have state-funded preschool if you don't have a state" - USA is protected by two immense oceans right and left and two huge, weak and pliable neighbors up and down. From all sides USA is well protected without spending hundreds of billions anually. About ballistic missiles threat - USA already has 1,200 nuclear warheads deployed in various forms (submarine, air force, ground silos) so MADD takes care of that.
With 2% of GDP USA would take care of all its defense needs. USA does not need 11 aircraft carrier groups, about 100 nuclear-powered submarines, about 2,000 jet fighters, only God knows how many destroyers, to protect itself.
I agree the US could take care of its defense needs with 2% of GDP. But that would be a 40% cut, not a 90% cut. What we wouldn't be able to do is commit to protecting Europe or backstopping global capitalism.
Who would ever want to invade the US? You would be destroying nearly everything of value because half the US economy is based on financial services. And it would make middle eastern insurgencies seem like childs play compared to the 10x higher gun ownership rate with better and more modern firearms in the US with a far higher percentage of practiced shooters and veterans.
Effectively, no one. The CCP doesn’t have the logistics capability or manpower to manage the largest occupation in the history of the world from half a world away.
They can and do want to destabilize American hegemony, but that doesn’t necessitate an end to the American state. My read is they prefer something like the British model for ex-imperials.
The debt can be inflated away (which is the only plausible way this is going to go) but it might cause the dollar to be dropped as the world reserve currency. I don't know for sure what happens in that case..
I suspect that imports would become enormously more expensive, which would reveal the catastrophic erosion in worker rights and pay due to neoliberalism. People would be suddenly aware of how much less they are making and how much more the wealthy are taking than was the case 40 years ago. This in turn might result in political instability. But who knows.
> I don't know for sure what happens in that case..
One thing would be that GDP per Capita would fall to something like Germany (and I'm been kind there assuming it would only drop that much) there isn't inherently anything about the US that says it's GDP per capita has to be ~50% higher than Germany.
> One thing would be that GDP per Capita would fall
Why? What is the mechanism that links being the reserve currency and (real?) GDP per capita?
I can see why being the reserve currency is an advantage for the finical sector, maybe international trade. But I don't understand how if the world stopped trading in dollars and switched to gold or Bitcoin or some basket of currencies, GDP per capita would be majorly impacted.
Being the reserve currency props up our currency conversions because everyone wants USD to trade with. If we lose that, the value of the USD falls relative to other currencies (and especially relative to the new reserve currency). Our GDP would presumably be measured in whatever the new reserve currency is, and that alone would cause a GDP drop just due to unfavorable currency conversions.
Being the reserve currency also makes imports cheap but exports unappealingly expensive. Losing that means the inverse; imports are expensive and exports are more appealing internationally, but our economy is set up for cheap imports and not exporting much. It would take a while to realign to doing manufacturing for domestic supply and GDP via exports.
And assuming that median salary drops the same percentage as gdp per capita, it would drop to 41k, which puts a lot of people beneath the threshold to pay their mortgage.
Of course taking a huge pay cut is not something most people are willing to do, so you'd probably actually see mass unemployment and salaries being inflated away.
In response the fed will do the only thing it knows, which is to rev up the money printer even more. But thats going to make all these problems worse, leading to a vicious cycle.
And in the midst of economic chaos, people's danger switches get activated and they will turn to an authoritarian strongman who will make them feel safe.
And generally speaking, once such a person is in power, they can only think of one way to solve their problems, which is to plunder their neighbors by going to war. Thats basically the imperial cycle.
It sucks to be able to see all this coming and yet be powerless to stop it..
There's nothing particularly special about the debt being larger than GDP. GDP is not income and debt is paid over time. For context, China has a Government Debt to GDP ratio of 96%, the UK is at 94%, France at 116%, Japan is at 263%.
It is a popular benchmark for military spending though.
Debt to tax revenue would make more sense as a metric.
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Roman emperors starting with Marcus Aurelius began devaluing their currency to pay for endless war, and to a lesser extent, free bread; i believe that is the principle cause of the decline of Roman empire.
It is more of the endless civil wars they had. See the Crisis of the Third Century when every military regional commander revolted and marched on Rome. Even during times of peace e.g., during Augustus time, they would pass laws trying to stop people from amputating their son's thumbs to avoid conscription.
Empire is a structure that exist strangely disconnected from the country that spawned it to keep the lights at the cost of other countries.
Just imagine if the us empire and its institutions, war machine parted ways with the country and its population. It would not be as hard as one imagines, but would reveal a country that has benefitted in parts by snuggling up to the imperial maxhine, while other paets where abandoned. It would also reveal how deeply the empire structure seeped into the privat social landscape.
> Just imagine if the us empire and its institutions, war machine parted ways with the country and its population.
I suspect we may not have to imagine this for long. The DOGEing of the federal government pulled a lot of the benefits of the union away from the people, and the recent political maneuvering around voting districts and other inter-state power contests suggest that the notion of the US as one nation and one people with a shared set of values is increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground. We have the most powerful military in the world (probably?), but in terms of the domestic situation, the federalized model is under incredible stress and the bargains that held it together seem to be failing or being intentionally broken. Your description of the empire leaving the country behind - or vice versa - feels less far-fetched than it would have a generation ago.
America teeters on the edge like Britain prior to ww2...one more military overstep and it's over for you
The real estate diplomats and their extended family know what they're doing. Give them more time.
good thing the current administration was basically elected to fix it. how's that going?
Well they lowered taxes on the richest (reduced income) and have increased spending (defense, ICE, ballrooms, what have you). So, exactly as predicted.
Don't forget the $3.6T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Deficit spending is one place where the major parties are in complete agreement. So it just wastes political capital, unless you see Thomas Massie somehow amassing a majority of Congressmen interested in his issues.
Absolutely insane. The data has been clear since at least Reagan that Democrats tax and spend, while Republicans just spend.
Several trillion dollars of the debt comes just from Trump reducing taxes for rich people and companies.
It’s going great for them!
The Associated Press doesn’t list that as one of his key campaign promises: https://apnews.com/projects/trump-campaign-promise-tracker/
It also doesn’t appear on the ALL CAPS list of campaign priorities: https://rncplatform.donaldjtrump.com/. The word “debt” doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. And the word “deficit” appears just once in the context of the trade deficit.
Trump was the first candidate to release a list of itemized priorities in small words and ALL CAPS so the average dumbass could understand. There are many, many things you can say about this list. But it’s very hard to inject ambiguity into what he was running on.
A more detailed version of the policies behind this list can be found here
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
Republicans love to increase national debt while in power and then use it as a weapon when not.
Just one more $25 Billion for this tiny war and then they'll start working on it.
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Kushner is neck deep in Saudi money, Trump is taking plane-bribes from the Qataris, and their crypto schemes pave an open road into their wallets… obviously the problem is Zionists.
Pay no attention to who has oil, how American oil interests — much less obvious ones as ancient as Bushes and Cheney — shape policy, forget the size of the economies or how many billionaires are in each category, openly splashing cash at POTUS. Numbers, boo.
Forget 9/11, do not look at Afghanistan the US was never there, ignore bribes from regional powers. Zionism is the real threat.
You see, The Elders from the malaria ridden unwanted leftover chunks of Jordan’s immaculate creation are pulling the strings of Great Satan. They do it through ‘elite donors’, donors so elite the Heritage Foundation has taken over an entire branch of the American government and in parallel obfuscated foreign funding to “elite” Universities has plagiarist anti-semites with deplorable ideologies smirking in Congress while explaining why The Intifada needs to be more present in American cities and schools. Natural conclusions of The Zionist plot. o_o
The interesting thing about name calling is that where attention is being pointed away from is often more important than the target. Logs and splinters… you know, from that Bible people used to pretend to have read, about an uppity Jew.
Zionism is indeed the real threat.
Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison gave Trump hundreds of millions during his campaign to ensure this war happened.
Netanyahu visited Trump 7 times leading up to this war in Iran.
Every geopolitical expert on this topic has weighed in on it concluding it was obviously a move that only benefits Israel and weakens the US on the global stage.
There were 2 checks on Israel’s power in the Middle East: Iraq and Iran.
It is no coincidence that the USA has invaded both.
After Iran falls, Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. They have ambitions to dominate the entire region, including Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Egypt. Just Google “greater Israel project”.
America can’t solve this problem democratically. Trump has taught the GOP you can win elections through targeted bribery (e.g. No Taxes on Tips), avoiding hard decisions (e.g. no cuts to entitlements), and distracting people with expensive spectacle. Meanwhile, Democrats are a collection of interest groups held together by patronage. In the recent election, Democrats were knee-capped because inflation made it impossible to promise expensive new programs. With expanding benefits off the table as a carrot, Trump was able to make big gains among Democrat groups (e.g. Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens, Muslim immigrants in Michigan) that lean more conservative on issues other than government welfare.
That leaves everyone dealing in fictions: the fiction that you can reduce debt by cutting taxes, the fiction you can reduce debt by increasing spending, and fictions about how much you really balance the books by targeting only “billionaires” instead of taxing the middle class.
The only problem that exists is spending too much money. They could fix this overnight if people were willing to give up public entitlements and healthcare support. But they aren’t willing to so the US will eventually see hyper inflation or less likely bankruptcy
No, you can also raise taxes. The deficit is 4% of GDP. If we raised taxes by 4% of GDP, we'd still be less than the OECD average. We'd be the same as Australia, which is the second lowest-tax Anglosphere country.
We are spending 3 trillion extra dollars than we take in taxes per year. That means taxes would go up by 75 percent. Even then it doesn’t matter because we will spend even more. Everyone agrees to spend, no one agrees to cut
I must have been looking at old data, but it looks like $1.9 trillion in FY2026. So that's 6.5% of GDP rather than 4% like I said above. Taxes as a percentage of GDP is currently about 25%, so going up to 31.5% would be a 26% jump. Not great, but not catastrophic.
But I agree that if we raised taxes we would just spend more. :(
If taxes are raised then the people have to pay for the services, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do. That is the whole appeal of having those services — that they are, for all intents and purposes, free.
I mean this is the problem with half a century of global-hegemony-fueled debt binging. We could balance the budget our taxes would still be $2.7 trillion lower than what they would be if we were at the EU average.
Hegemony is large irrelevant as much of Europe is facing the exact same issue, some of it much worse than the US
The overnight fix, to be perfectly clear, would require illegal firing of federal judges and getting rid of the filibuster, just to start fixing.
The real overnight fix would be something we can't say on the internet without getting banned from whatever site we say it on
Eventually, paraleipsis will be insufficient to protect yourself from this sort of behavior, c.f. the new Comey indictment.
we should give up 765 things first before entitlements - starting with cutting Department of War budget by about 90% and go from there
That would be irrational. Even the UK and France spend 2% of GDP on defense, and they live under America's shield. Cutting our spending down to their level would save $400 billion/year. That's not peanuts, but that's only 1/3 of the deficit.
Having sufficient capacity for violence is indispensable for the existence of a state. You need a military so you can kill people in other countries, and you need police so you can maintain an internal monopoly on violence. You can't have state-funded preschool if you don't have a state. The Ukrainians unfortunately are learning this the hard way right now.
Re: "You can't have state-funded preschool if you don't have a state" - USA is protected by two immense oceans right and left and two huge, weak and pliable neighbors up and down. From all sides USA is well protected without spending hundreds of billions anually. About ballistic missiles threat - USA already has 1,200 nuclear warheads deployed in various forms (submarine, air force, ground silos) so MADD takes care of that.
With 2% of GDP USA would take care of all its defense needs. USA does not need 11 aircraft carrier groups, about 100 nuclear-powered submarines, about 2,000 jet fighters, only God knows how many destroyers, to protect itself.
I agree the US could take care of its defense needs with 2% of GDP. But that would be a 40% cut, not a 90% cut. What we wouldn't be able to do is commit to protecting Europe or backstopping global capitalism.
Who would ever want to invade the US? You would be destroying nearly everything of value because half the US economy is based on financial services. And it would make middle eastern insurgencies seem like childs play compared to the 10x higher gun ownership rate with better and more modern firearms in the US with a far higher percentage of practiced shooters and veterans.
> Who would ever want to invade the US?
Effectively, no one. The CCP doesn’t have the logistics capability or manpower to manage the largest occupation in the history of the world from half a world away.
They can and do want to destabilize American hegemony, but that doesn’t necessitate an end to the American state. My read is they prefer something like the British model for ex-imperials.
Taxes can always be raised before going bankrupt.
The debt can be inflated away (which is the only plausible way this is going to go) but it might cause the dollar to be dropped as the world reserve currency. I don't know for sure what happens in that case..
I suspect that imports would become enormously more expensive, which would reveal the catastrophic erosion in worker rights and pay due to neoliberalism. People would be suddenly aware of how much less they are making and how much more the wealthy are taking than was the case 40 years ago. This in turn might result in political instability. But who knows.
> I don't know for sure what happens in that case..
One thing would be that GDP per Capita would fall to something like Germany (and I'm been kind there assuming it would only drop that much) there isn't inherently anything about the US that says it's GDP per capita has to be ~50% higher than Germany.
> One thing would be that GDP per Capita would fall
Why? What is the mechanism that links being the reserve currency and (real?) GDP per capita? I can see why being the reserve currency is an advantage for the finical sector, maybe international trade. But I don't understand how if the world stopped trading in dollars and switched to gold or Bitcoin or some basket of currencies, GDP per capita would be majorly impacted.
Being the reserve currency props up our currency conversions because everyone wants USD to trade with. If we lose that, the value of the USD falls relative to other currencies (and especially relative to the new reserve currency). Our GDP would presumably be measured in whatever the new reserve currency is, and that alone would cause a GDP drop just due to unfavorable currency conversions.
Being the reserve currency also makes imports cheap but exports unappealingly expensive. Losing that means the inverse; imports are expensive and exports are more appealing internationally, but our economy is set up for cheap imports and not exporting much. It would take a while to realign to doing manufacturing for domestic supply and GDP via exports.
And assuming that median salary drops the same percentage as gdp per capita, it would drop to 41k, which puts a lot of people beneath the threshold to pay their mortgage.
Of course taking a huge pay cut is not something most people are willing to do, so you'd probably actually see mass unemployment and salaries being inflated away.
In response the fed will do the only thing it knows, which is to rev up the money printer even more. But thats going to make all these problems worse, leading to a vicious cycle.
And in the midst of economic chaos, people's danger switches get activated and they will turn to an authoritarian strongman who will make them feel safe.
And generally speaking, once such a person is in power, they can only think of one way to solve their problems, which is to plunder their neighbors by going to war. Thats basically the imperial cycle.
It sucks to be able to see all this coming and yet be powerless to stop it..
[dead]