Remember When the Balanced Budget Amendment Was A Thing?
$37 Trillion in Debt and Counting
With the U.S. national debt sitting at $37 trillion, it’s hard to imagine a time when Congress argued for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Remember when Republicans had a reputation for fiscal conservatism?
According to the non-partisan CBO, President Trump’s big beautiful bill will add another $3.3 trillion in debt over the next decade. At the same time, the bill cuts health care to poor people. This from the New York Times:
G.O.P. Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, C.B.O. Says
Analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that Republicans’ new version of the legislation would make far deeper cuts and lead to more people becoming uninsured than previous proposals.
Who needs health insurance, am I right?
Yearly interest on the national debt is now higher than the Pentagon budget, which is truly saying (and spending) a lot.
Where is all the money going? Leaving aside the cost of servicing the national debt, most of discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and similar forces of aggression and repression. New nuclear weapons, for example, may cost $2 trillion over the next 30 years. A misnamed “golden dome” (leaky sieve is more accurate) allegedly to protect America against nuclear missile attacks may cost $500 billion or more over the next decade or two. And nothing costs as much as foreign wars, as we learned from the disastrous Iraq and Afghan Wars, which may end up adding $8 trillion to the national debt when all the bills come due.
While achieving a balanced budget isn’t easy, there are two easy ways to come closer:
Tax the rich.
Stop making war, downsize the empire, and focus the U.S. military on national defense and defense alone.
Option (1) is out since the rich own the government. (Welcome to Plutocracy USA.) Option (2) is also out since the military-industrial-congressional complex is the fourth branch of government and arguably the most powerful. All presidents appease it, whether their names are Bush or Biden, Obama or Trump.
So, Congress and the President do what they always do: Serve the rich and kowtow to the MICC, the National (In)Security State. Any “balancing” to be done with the federal budget will be done on the tired backs of the poor and disadvantaged. They have no lobbies, no money, no say.
Can the working classes pull America up by their collective bootstraps? America’s workers have achieved miracles before, but this is too big of an ask even for them.
The primary victory of Zohran Mamdani and the wedding of Bezos/Sanchez happened in the same week. Together they say a great deal about how bad our situation is.
Mamdani's campaign basically was about how New York City - the 'Emerald City' of the capitalist Oz - is unaffordable for the majority of its citizens. Even though many of his proposals would not make it through any political process, that even suggesting something different for the working class of NYC was enough for the rich to proclaim they're all leaving - or to man the barricades on Wall Street (check that - they'd hire someone else to do that).
Meanwhile, Bezos' wedding apparently cost $25 million - that number is under some debate, and it's unclear if it included the costs of private airplanes and luxury housing for all his privileged guests. But the sense of entitlement and privilege reeked from even the one or two photos I was able to stomach.
That the owners live in their own privileged bubble - protected from the existence of the great unwashed or seeing them as just backdrop to their own fabulous lives, says there is no solution to the reckless spending of this criminal empire.
While Dickens was talking about London and Paris, today it's New York City and Venice, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..."
I don't think A.Word.A.Day (Wordsmith.org) is subscribed to Bracing Views, but just now it sent us this:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. -Frédéric Bastiat, economist and writer (30 Jun 1801-1850)