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posted by martyb on Friday September 15 2017, @12:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the mucha-moolah dept.

The U.S. national debt reached $20 trillion for the first time ever last Friday after President Trump signed a bipartisan bill temporarily raising the nation's debt limit for three months.

While at Camp David, Mr. Trump, with the stroke of his presidential pen, increased the statutory debt last Friday by approximately $318 billion, according to the Treasury Department. Before the bill's completion, the U.S. debt was sitting around $19.84 trillion.

The legislation allowed the Treasury Department to start borrowing again immediately after several months of using "extraordinary measures" to avoid a financial default. The bill passed last Thursday 80-17 in the Senate and in the House 316-90 on Friday. Around $15 billion in emergency funding for Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts was attached to the borrowing measure.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-debt-hits-historic-20-trillion-mark/

[That works out to just shy of $62,000 per American. --Ed.]


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @05:19PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @05:19PM (#568557)

    Nope, tax and spend is what we call being responsible. You spend money that you have coming in. Ideally the amount of money coming in is the same as the money going out as the government isn't supposed to run a profit over the long term.

    I'm really, really curious where people got the idea that tax and spend is a bad idea. That's how literally every nation ever has managed things. You raise money via taxes to pay for whatever it is the government needs. The only way around that is to either have a government that does nothing or for the government to go around seizing the things it needs at gun point. I don't think you're really suggesting that's a better idea.

    The issue is more than anything else that neoliberals have infected enough of the voters that they honestly think that tax and spend is bad without considering what the taxes are and what the spending is for. Taxing at a rate of 50% sounds bad, but when you consider what folks in those areas are getting for the money, it doesn't sound like such a bad idea. They have the government paying for things that we pay for out of pocket and paying a lot less than we do. At least in some cases, there are cases, I'm sure, where the money just goes into a dictator's slush fund from kickbacks.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @05:47PM (#568573)

    When the government prints money, it is transferring purchasing power from the holders of that money to the government.

    This is exactly the same as a tax; the difference is that people don't realize they are being taxed, because that kind of taxation is never discussed in open debate and passed with in-you-face legislation or explicit line items in your tax bill. It is Taxation without Representation.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @06:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @06:21PM (#568605)

      You obviously don't understand how democracies function. We voted for the people that made those decisions. Just because we're not a direct democracy, doesn't make this taxation without representation. We are represented, those people making those decisions are our representatives.

      The issue here is that half the country votes for people that proudly own up to doing things like this. And the other half of the country has people to vote for that do it quietly. We had an option to vote for a Presidential candidate that wasn't going to do it, but we got screwed over by those stupid Hillary voters and the DNC.

      Ultimately, we got this because enough people choose to vote against their own self interest that there's no longer any point in lying about their priorities.