Showing posts with label Spending 2025. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spending 2025. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

If you paid attention to NeverTrump, you knew Charlie Kirk was a phony ten years ago, which is why he promoted fellow phony J. D. Vance to be VP

 


 

Kirk hated Trump but saw an opportunity, claims ex-employee...

 

Well no shit.

The GOP today is riddled with sycophants who formerly opposed Trump but support him now. Those of us who supported Trump in 2015-2016 took great pleasure in pointing it out as they came crawling back.

Many who changed their minds about supporting Trump defend themselves today by saying they changed their minds because they were persuaded by reflection on the Trumpist agenda, but none of that is becoming the law of the land today through the GOP Congress. It's all by executive order and lawfare. None of this will last, except for the ka-ching ka-ching.

In Charlie Kirk's case, flipping to Trump has been bery bery good for Turning Point USA, which went from a lousy little $2 million operation in 2015 to an $80 million one by 2022.

I mean, how many dollars will it take before we actually get some of that fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government which it is supposed to promote, seeing that we're headed for a $2 TRILLION deficit by September 30th?

 

Considering how awful Trump is now on just about everything compared with his first term, it must be that they all flipflopped only for the money, the power, and the influence.  

 


 

  

Friday, September 12, 2025

You know, at this point I'd settle for billions and billions coming in

 



The fiscal year is rapidly coming to a close, and Trump has spent us $1.973 trillion deeper into the hole with one month left to go, compared with Biden's last year at $1.897 trillion through August

 















Meanwhile ...

... [Charlie] Kirk, who had millions of social media followers, co-founded the non-profit Turning Point USA in 2012 as a teenager, which he dubbed a 'national student movement.' 

Its mission is to 'identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.' ...

 

Monday, September 8, 2025

Treasury Secretary Bessent tells a whopper


 
 
These jokers have added $1.2 trillion to the national debt in TWO months.
 
The 10-year US Treasury has returned 1.013% nominal in the last twelve months, -1.419% real. 

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Bonds tank and gold soars to start September in huge embarrassment to Banana Republican Donald Trump, who wouldn't pay his own bills let alone the country's

... Tariffs are set to bring in $172.1 billion in 2025, according to the Tax Foundation, which would be a nice financial boost to a country with a ballooning budget deficit.

“If this ruling is upheld, refunds of existing tariffs are on the table which could cause a surge in Treasury issuance and yields,” wrote Ed Mills of Raymond James in a note. ...

More

 



Friday, August 29, 2025

Trump's federal government spending cuts are non-existent: We're on track to blow $7.3 trillion as expected

 The Elon Musk-DOGE spending cut affair was pure theatre.

When I said we spend $20 billion a day I wasn't kidding.

OK, it's only $19.869794 billion a day.

Meanwhile revenues are expected to fall short by $4.842671 billion PER DAY in 2025. 


 

Thursday, August 21, 2025

Trump adds $1 trillion to the national debt in record time and S&P Global underscores its own irrelevance by maintaining the U.S. AA+ credit rating

 Trump tariff revenue expected to offset tax bill impact, S&P says in U.S. credit rating hold

... "We could lower the rating over the next two to three years if already high deficits increase ..." lol.

 These people are afraid of Trump.

They don't want to be singled out for Trump's daily Two Minutes Hate.

They don't want to be the next Jerome Powell, or Lisa Cook, or Volodymyr Zelensky.

Meanwhile year to date the Trump deficit is running $112 billion ahead of Biden's last deficit. DOGE so-called spending cuts and Trump Tariffs have done nothing to reduce it.

 



 


 

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Elon Musk's phony Doge spending cut math was basically like positing there was a $20,000 credit limit when there wasn't, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000'

 

... DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.

Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.

“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.” ...

More. 

Trump's deficit year to date is $112 billion higher through July than Biden's through July last year, up 7.4%

 


Saturday, July 19, 2025

The EU spent more on anti-carbon lunacy in 2024 than on defense

... the EU is now promising to cut carbon emissions by 90% in just 15 years. This goes even further than its already foolhardy promise of a 55% cut by 2030. ...

The EU splurged $381 billion just in 2024 on solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and the like — more than its entire spending on defense. This is delivering skyrocketing electricity bills — last year they were two times higher than in the US. ...

... the climate impact from the EU’s policies will be next-to-nothing. Run the promised 90% by 2040 and net-zero by 2050 in the United Nations’ own climate model and compare the temperature outcome with the current policy. Because the EU matters little in global emissions and because it has already cut emissions significantly, it will only reduce global emissions through the 21st century by a small 3%. The temperature difference in 2050 is a vanishing 0.02°F and even by 2100 the impact will be impossible to measure at 0.07°F.

All while models show that the cost for the EU by mid-century could be more than $3 trillion every year — more than all current public spending in the EU. ...

More

Friday, July 11, 2025

Elon Musk/DOGE cuts failure continues: Federal deficit spending is 5% higher year to date through June than it was last year at this time, according to the monthly statement of the U. S. Treasury Department

 The fiscal year to date deficit October 2023-June 2024 was $1.273258 trillion.

The fiscal year to date deficit October 2024-June 2025 is $1.337372 trillion, $64.114 billion higher than a year ago, or 5%. 


 

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

The US Senate's biggest phony, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, boasted he had enough votes to stop Trump's bill, but voted for it all three times in the end

 


 

The roll call votes are here, here, and here.

June 4, 2025, here:

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” as “immoral” and “grotesque,” and reiterated that he will vote against it unless his GOP colleagues make major changes.

“This is immoral, what us old farts doing to our young people,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” after sounding alarms that the massive tax-and-spending-cut bill would add trillions of dollars to national deficits.

“This is grotesque, what we’re doing,” Johnson said. “We need to own up to that. This is our moment.”

“I can’t accept the scenario, I can’t accept it, so I won’t vote for it, unless we are serious about fixing it,” he continued.

Johnson has been among the Senate’s loudest GOP critics of the budget bill that narrowly passed the House last month.

Johnson and other fiscal hawks have taken aim over its effect on the nation’s debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated later Wednesday that the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Johnson has proposed splitting the bill into two parts, though Trump insists on passing his agenda in a single package.

“The president and Senate leadership has to understand that we’re serious now,” Johnson said of himself and the handful of other GOP senators whose opposition to the bill could imperil its chances.

“They all say, ‘Oh, we can pressure these guys.’ No, you can’t.”

Republicans hold a narrow 53-47 majority in the Senate, so they can only afford to lose a handful of votes to get the bill passed in a party-line vote.

“Let’s discuss the numbers, and let’s focus on our children and grandchildren, whose futures are being mortgaged, their prospects are being diminished by what we are doing to them,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s comments came one day after Elon Musk ripped into the spending bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” that will lead to exploding deficits. The White House brushed aside Musk’s comments.

Johnson said Musk’s criticisms bolster the case against the bill.

“He’s in the inside, he showed … President Trump how to do this, you know, contract by contract, line by line,” Johnson said of Musk. “We have to do that.”

Johnson said his campaign against the bill in its current form is not a “long shot,” because he thinks there are “enough” Republican senators who will vote against the bill.

“We want to see [Trump] succeed, but again, my loyalty is to our kids and grandkids,” he said.

“So there’s enough of us who have that attitude that very respectfully we just have say, ’Mr. President, I’m sorry, ‘one, big, beautiful bill’ was not the best idea,” he added.

 

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill

This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help. 

This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find. 

 
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs!
 
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline. Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion, depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
 
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost $3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is $400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...

In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...

For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...           

Update Wed Jun 25:

Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol. 

Saturday, June 21, 2025

The U.S. Senate parliamentarian still has not ruled on the GOP's wacky current policy vs. current law baseline

The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017. 

The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.

I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.

 

 GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill

... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...

Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...