Posted on 10/12/2020 5:45:11 AM PDT by karpov
It's a difficult time to be a deficit hawk.
In March, Congress passed the CARES Act, named to show what lawmakers on both sides of the aisle wanted to be seen to be doing in the wake of the economic devastation caused by the outbreak of COVID-19. They cared to the tune of about $2.2 trillion, all of it billed to the deficit, making it the single biggest legislative care package in history by a wide margin. It was the first time Congress had ever passed a bill with a trillion-dollar price tag. As a point of comparison, the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health law that would be known as Obamacare, which was viewed as unusually costly, had to be whittled down during the legislative process so as not to technically exceed the trillion-dollar mark. Its 10-year price tag, at the time of passage, came in around $940 billion.
But any real worries about those sky-high figures appear to have melted away in the face of the pandemic, which has exposed the underlying unseriousness of Washington's approach to budgeting. For nearly 40 years, federal lawmakers have been trying, or at least pretending to try, to reduce the deficit. But when asked to make tough budgetary choices, they consistently buckle under the pressure of partisan politics. This, in turn, has given rise to simplistic economic theories designed to justify whatever outcomes are most convenient.
The CARES Act followed a series of smaller relief bills and would be succeeded by a $310 billion top-up to the original bill's small business loan program, bringing Congress' total coronavirus relief spending to nearly $3 trillion. And that was just for starters. By summer's end, House Democrats and Senate Republicans were haggling over a new round of stimulus
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
2019 was a very “interesting” year. 2020 blew it away.
2021 will be one for the history books.
No, not yet. I see no indication that the mass delusion is on the verge of collapse.
However, we won’t see it coming. It will just go Boom.
The dollar will meet reality on the foreign exchange market.
Just as long as all the money ends up in the hands of rich people, we’ll be OK. They’ll just buy stocks.
The dollar will sink.
Foreigners will sell American shares.
Yep. Unfortunately.
Yet strangely, throughout this crisis, foreigners have flocked to the US dollar. I didn’t expect that with sky high entitlements and debt.
With Joe Biden as their puppet, the Chicoms will realize their wet dream of replacing the dollar with the yuan as the world's reserve currency. That's when things go "Boom!" Bankruptcy and Weimar style turbo inflation.
What a joke! As long as fiat currency is used and the government has the total control and can tax us all into oblivion there is never a limit to the debt spending. They can always rely on collecting more later. Debt is completely meaningless anymore.
Debt is not the big issue. SPENDING is the big issue.
The Left wants to make debt the issue (so they can raise taxes which is MUCH WORSE than the debt).
THE greatest political threat today BY FAR is the 80% unconstitutional $4 trillion Federal Government’s SPENDING.
Donald Trump’s job in the next four years (after his landslide victory over Biden) will be to DISMANTLE the 80% unconstitutional portion of the government.
MAGA by RESTORING AMERICA’S FREE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC!!!
That happens everyday. Of course all of the other currencies meet reality everyday too. There is a global debt problem, and it's a matter of choosing the least worst to be the reserve.
Of course there is always a gold (or other) standard that could be resorted to, but that would not support the global debt structure that exists now.
Thanks for this article. I like Trump but was extremely disappointed to see the national deficit balloon to $1 trillion *before* COVID. After COVID, of course, all bets were off. I simply do not see why Trump did not veto any budget that spent more money than it received in tax revenue. The pre-COVID economic boom would have been a great time to pay down the deficit and thus reduce our reliance on China. If I ran my household budget the way the swamp runs our government, I’d be living in a cardboard box right now.
They are about to spend another 1.5-2 Trillion dollars.
So the answer is NO.
Trump is NOT a fiscal conservative. Never has been, never will be.
“If I ran my household budget the way the swamp runs our government, I’d be living in a cardboard box right now.
“Not if you had your own printing press and enough fools who would sell you stuff for your freshly printed paper money.
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