Free Republic

The interest burden of the public debt of the U.S. government has topped $1 trillion already this year, the first time interest costs have crossed the trillion dollar threshold. In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, interest payments totaled $1.05 trillion, up 30 percent from a year ago, the Treasury Department said Thursday. This is the first time interest payments have ever climbed about $1 trillion. Despite claims by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to have addressed the U.S. budget deficit, the deficit is up 24 percent in the first 11 months of this fiscal...

Ask any budget expert in Washington to explain the ballooning deficit and debt, and Social Security and Medicare will be high on the list of causes. That’s wrong. The real driver, the elephant in the room, is means-tested social-welfare spending—Medicaid, food stamps, refundable tax credits, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, federal housing subsidies and almost 100 other programs whose eligibility is limited to those below an income threshold. True, Social Security and Medicare are a drain on general revenue and will become big fiscal problems if not reformed. But they aren’t the major source of our current...

Unsustainable. The country is going bankrupt. Trump is the only path forward. CBO: Federal Interest Payments Now Exceed Defense Spending... Federal Debt: The Ticking Bomb in Your Wallet.. Grab your pay stub .. and see how much you paid in federal income tax…over 75% of that was effectively your contribution to interest on the debt .. This is where our federal government is today. It has spent so much more than it has taken in that it has racked up a $35 trillion debt. ... over 75% of that was effectively your contribution to interest on the debt last month....

Based on data from a U.S. Treasury report, the federal government has amassed $142 trillion in debts, liabilities, and unfunded obligations. This staggering figure equals 93 percent of all the wealth Americans have accumulated since the nation’s founding, estimated by the Federal Reserve to be $152 trillion. Unlike other measures of federal red ink that cover an arbitrary period, extend into the infinite future, or ignore government resources, the figure of $142 trillion applies strictly to Americans who are alive right now and includes the government’s commercial assets. Thus, it quantifies the financial burden that today’s Americans are leaving to...

An advocacy group led by former Vice President Mike Pence is urging lawmakers to consider a laundry list of spending reforms to confront the growing national debt. Advancing American Freedom, in an 8-page document obtained by The Hill, issued what it called a “guide to cutting federal spending,” a three-step plan that comes as the national debt recently surpassed $35 trillion. “After decades of ignoring the significance of profligate federal spending, the consequences are finally starting to catch up to us,” the document states. “As has been the case, the problem is not a lack of revenue, but rather a...

The US national debt – the total amount of Treasury securities – rose to $35.00 trillion, according to the Treasury Department on Friday (rounded to the nearest billion: $34.998 trillion). Since the beginning of the year, in less than seven months, the debt has jumped by $1.0 trillion. In the three-and-a-half years since January 2020, the debt has ballooned by 50%. The economy has been growing rapidly since the trough in 2020. Yet trillions in new debt were whizzing by so fast they were hard to see, like, “Oh wow, there went another one I think.” We don’t even want...

76% of all personal income tax last month went to servicing the $34 trillion national debt. How did we get here? Two men: FDR and Richard Nixon. Together, they broke the dollar. And put the American people into debt slavery. (3 minute and 46 seconds video in the link below) https://x.com/profstonge/status/1816813562771255713

The federal government ran another big deficit in June, as the national debt inches closer to $35 trillion.$35 trillion USD.Trillion with a 'T.' That's an unfathomable number. It's meaningless to most people. We simply can't comprehend a number that big.Let's try to put the $34.9 trillion national debt into perspective.According to the National Debt Clock, every American citizen would have to write a check for $103,565 to pay off the national debt. Of course, a lot of people don't pay taxes. That means the taxpayer burden is much higher. Every U.S. taxpayer would have to write a check for $266,953...

You may have heard that the 2017 GOP tax cuts blew a giant hole in the federal budget—or so Democrats tell voters. The Congressional Budget Office’s revised 10-year budget forecast out Tuesday offers a reality check. Spending is the real problem, and it’s getting worse. CBO projects that this year’s budget deficit will clock in at roughly $2 trillion, some $400 billion more than it forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit. This is unprecedented when the economy is growing and defense spending is nearly flat. The deficit this fiscal year will be 7% of GDP,...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday said the swelling national debt is manageable as long as it stays around where it is relative to the rest of the economy. In a CNBC interview, Yellen also noted that high interest rates are adding to the burden as the U.S. manages its massive $34.7 trillion debt load. "If the debt is stabilized relative to the size of the economy, we're in a reasonable place," she told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin during a "Squawk Box" live interview. "The way I look at it is that we should be looking at the real interest...

The International Monetary Fund sounded the alarm on the Biden administration’s rampant spending as “out of line with what is needed for long-term fiscal stability.” The latest forecast from the IMF — a Washington-based group tasked with fighting financial crises worldwide — warned that the ballooning national debt and the fiscal deficit threatened to exacerbate sky-high levels of inflation while posing a long-term risk to the global economy. The IMF noted in its forecast that the US federal budget deficit grew from $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2022 to $1.7 trillion last year. ... The debt held by the public, which...

April 15 is usually Tax Day in the United States – the day by which your individual federal tax return has to have been filed, if you’re to avoid a late penalty. And if you’re in one of the many states with its own statewide income tax – 43 at last count – that usually shares the same deadline. By what right does the government take this money from us? That’s an easy one. The Constitution says it can. To be specific, the 16th Amendment authorized the federal government to collect income taxes, so it’s been legal for 110 years....

"Di Leo: The Cheap Mercedes and the Beautiful Bridge" I am told that there is a saying in the used car business: “Nothing is more expensive than a cheap Mercedes.” That’s not to say that it’s not possible to get a good price on a used Mercedes. It probably is. But the buyer must remember that people who buy new luxury cars are people who can afford the repairs on them. And even though that used car may be cheaper than a new car, once it’s in your possession, everything else that goes wrong, from brakes to HVAC, from shocks...

The U.S. began adding $1 trillion worth of debt about every three months beginning last June, a Bank of America investment strategist Michael Hartnett first pointed out in an investment note published last week. The national debt is currently $34.48 trillion and rising. It surpassed $34 trillion for the first time in U.S. history on Jan. 4. Three months prior, the debt first reached $33 trillion on Sept. 15, 2023. Three months prior to that, it first reached $32 trillion on June 15, 2023. “The national debt is the amount of money the federal government has borrowed to cover the...

The debt load of the U.S. is growing at a quicker clip in recent months, increasing about $1 trillion nearly every 100 days. The nation’s debt permanently crossed over to $34 trillion on Jan. 4, after briefly crossing the mark on Dec. 29, according to data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It reached $33 trillion on Sept. 15, 2023, and $32 trillion on June 15, 2023, hitting this accelerated pace. Before that, the $1 trillion move higher from $31 trillion took about eight months. U.S. debt, which is the amount of money the federal government borrows to cover...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As questions continue to mount regarding the lack of fiscal responsibility exercised by lawmakers, U.S. Senators said they are not super worried about running up the national debt since most of them will die of natural causes in the next year or so. "Yeah, we're not too concerned about it," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "If any of us were in any position to be alive when it comes time to pay the piper, we might do things a bit differently. As things stand now, most of us have one foot in the grave already, so...

It’s a presidential election year. Time to talk numbers. It is said that the United States National Debt – that is, the total debt owed by the federal government for past overspending – is now over $34 trillion. That’s bad. Federal tax revenue – that’s all kinds, from import duties to corporate and personal income taxes – every year is about $4.5 trillion. Of that, we pay about $400 billion in interest on the national debt. That’s only about one percent of the total national debt, or about 7 to 10 percent of federal revenues (why such a range? It...

Washington, January 20./TASS/. In November, Russia cut its holdings of the US sovereign debt, from $31 min month-on-month to $28 min, according to the latest data published by the US Treasury... Japan remained he biggest holder of the US state debt in November 2023, as its increased its holdings to $1.127 trin from $1.09 trln in October, followed by China with $782 bln and the United Kingdom with $716.2 bln.

De-dollarization is the process of reducing the US dollar's hegemony in global trade and financial operations by shifting to alternative exchange methods such as national currencies and domestic payment systems, as well as transferring currency reserves. A third of UN member states have already opted for de-dollarization and decided to rely on national currencies to conduct payments, Sputnik's analysis has found. The analysis, which looked into statements made by officials from 193 UN countries in international and Russian media, showed that representatives of at least 68 UN nations openly supported the process of de-dollarization or stated that they were taking...

WASHINGTON, Jan 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. federal government's total public debt has reached $34 trillion for the first time, the U.S. Treasury Department reported on Tuesday as members of Congress gear up for another series of federal funding battles in coming weeks. The Daily Treasury Statement for Friday showed that the total public debt outstanding rose to $34.001 trillion from $33.911 on Thursday. The debt that counts toward the federal debt ceiling rose to $33.89 trillion on Friday from $33.794 trillion on Thursday. This "debt subject to limit" category excludes the unamortized discount on Treasury bills and zero coupon...