Just a reminder that the Fed said all these purchases it made in 2008 and again in 2020 were just temporary

Now Fed Chair Powell has just said it's time for the pace of the roll-off to slow.

That's the curved line slowly trending down from it's peak near $9 trillion to $7.5 trillion now.

Just as the National Debt will never be paid down, the Fed will never stop intervening in the Treasury market to limit supply and support prices, which suppresses market driven interest rates. 

Powell isn't serious about fighting inflation.

 

 

Compromise spending bill passes US House 286-134 bringing fiscal year 2024 federal discretionary spending to $1.659 trillion through September

 WASHINGTON — The House voted 286-134 on Friday to pass a sweeping $1.2 trillion government funding bill, sending it to the Senate just hours before the deadline to prevent a shutdown. ...

The bill, released early Thursday, funds the departments of Homeland Security, State, Labor, Defense, Health and Human Services and various other agencies. Together with the $459 billion bill passed earlier this month, it fully funds the federal government to the tune of $1.659 trillion through September, after months of stopgap bills and negotiations.

More here.

The Roll Call Vote is here, if you want to check how your representative voted. 

The argument is perennially NOT about deficit spending, but deficit spending on WHAT. 

The projected tax shortfall for all programs for fiscal 2024 is $1.582 trillion, more than half of which will be net interest expense of $0.870 trillion on the exploding national debt. Interest payments on what we have already borrowed now exceed defense outlays of $0.822 trillion.

CBO in early February estimated fiscal 2024 discretionary spending at $1.739 trillion, so today's bill "saves" a mere $80 billion off that.

Mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. is estimated at $3.908 trillion for fiscal 2024.

It's obvious that spending should be cut and taxes raised, but no one has the courage for either.

They should just agree to do both and let the chips fall where they may. Everyone out here will be pissed, vote accordingly, and it would be a wash politically.

Current national debt is $34.5612 trillion and rising.

Joe Biden buys 78,000 more votes, total vote-buying program to date adds $144 billion to the national debt

4 million voters purchased.

 Biden cancels nearly $6 billion in student debt for 78K public service workers

The White House has approved nearly $144 billion in federal loan forgiveness for about 4 million borrowers in total, according to the administration.

Jesse Kelly is the prototypical low IQ barbarian demagogue on the right who wants to destroy everything indiscriminately, akin to Julius Malema of South Africa on the left

Only this guy, who lasted 15 minutes in community college, understands the gravity of the debt situation.

Remember that guy who said "Only I can fix it" ?

Same guy. 

These are the forerunners of Draco. 

This guy has to be screenshot because he routinely deletes his tweets in order to not leave a trail.

 

I'm so old I remember when politicians ran on less government, now it's less corrupt government lol

 

Less Corrupt, More Accountable Government Wanted

America's New Majority Project

 

This is so silly. Politicians buy voters with spending legislation. Right now they want to give families and businesses $70 billion in new tax credits, and to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan $95 billion in new defense aid.

You don't get $34 trillion in debt by accident.

We have the government we deserve. It's the voters who are corrupt.

Oooh, but that's a surer third rail statement than "I want to cut Social Security" ever was. You cannot insult the voters and get re-elected.

That's what pulpits used to be for, but no one goes there anymore. Somebody has to say it.

Smaller government means less money sloshing around to help your friends and hurt your enemies, which is what this is really all about.

Repent, and believe the gospel. The alternative is oblivion for the U. S. A.

We're $34 trillion in debt, so Congress unites to spend $70 billion more we don't have on "the children" and on "small business" because it's an election year

 You have the government you deserve.

Story here.

Jay Powell's inflation has been bery bery good for corporate profits and a federal government drunk on debt

 

Inflation remains very, very profitable for corporations and federal government spendthrifts, at your expense

 

US pandemic debt orgy described as fiscal slippage lol

It's so indicative of our degeneracy how economic profligacy must not be described that way in this day and age where anything and everything is great, awesome, and epic but that.

Oh well, at least they still pay a modicum of respect with huge, swelled, and deluge.

If only all that cash were a tsunami, inundating the shore with ruinous inflation.

 

 

 

CNBC, here:

. . . investors are also pricing in surprising economic resilience alongside fiscal slippage.

 The U.S. federal government ended its fiscal year in September with a fiscal deficit of almost $1.7 trillion, the Treasury Department announced on Friday, adding to a huge national debt totaling $33.6 trillion. The country’s debt has swelled by more than $10 trillion since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the first quarter of 2020, prompting a deluge of fiscal stimulus to help prop up the economy.

The national debt is up $1.06 trillion since May 31, 2023

 To $32.518 trillion on July 12th.

It was $23.171 trillion on January 2, 2020, $9.347 trillion ago.

InflAtIOn Is sO OvEr.

Congress went on a spending orgy since 2019 adding $8.77 trillion to the national debt and dimwits blame the Fed for being unable to control inflation

 Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Blame yourselves. You elected them.

 

The chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

-- Plato, Republic, I, 346f.

The national debt is up $457 billion since May 31st

 

The lie of the day comes from Reuters via CNBC

... the national debt, which at $31.4 trillion is roughly equal to the annual output of the economy.

 

More.

 

1Q2023 GDP, 2nd estimate: Nominal: $26.4863 trillion.

 

118% is not "roughly equal".

 

And look what has happened to interest payments on the debt, which come out of current revenues. They have gone vertical. At $929 billion annualized, they represent 31.4% of current tax receipts annualized.

 

Everyone minimizing the gravity of this situation is whistling past the graveyard when government social benefits to persons already exceed the tax receipts.

 

This will continue until it can't, and great will be the fall of it.

 

 

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Biden's doing the same thing as Obama in making the 2020 crisis spending the baseline for his future spending proposals

 Obama did it in 2009 and Republicans acquiesced, running trillion dollar plus deficits for four straight years until Republicans enforced some fiscal discipline in Obama's second term.

The author below, a Republican, doesn't mention that.

Will Republicans acquiesce again?

If they do, the national debt will easily swell to in excess of $51 trillion by 2033, from $31 trillion at the end of 2022.

From the story, "Trillion-dollar deficits: Biden’s new normal":

The president and his White House have taken the 2020 COVID-19, one-time-only crisis budget as his administration’s working baseline, rather than the pre-Covid 2019 budget, which had a significant $4.4 trillion price tag.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, the budget jumped 47 percent to $6.5 trillion, as both Democrats and Republicans supported the need for emergency funding. That COVID funding was to sunset as the country returned to normal — as it did last year. Apparently, Biden decided to ignore that crucial point.

Nominal GDP is up $2.1 trillion in the last fiscal year, the national debt is up $2.5 trillion

 

Spiking interest payments on the national debt through 2Q2022 threaten to crowd out other current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and National Defense

 Wait until the second half is done. 

This is going to be ugly.

Money printing getting way ahead of output is the cause of the current inflation

 US GDP last clocked in at $24.883 trillion in 2Q. The total public debt at the end of 2Q is $30.569 trillion.

That's now a mismatch of 123%, up from 105% in 2013, ten years ago, when the total public debt was $16.8 trillion and the GDP $16 trillion.

In other words, the debt has grown by 82% over the period while the GDP has grown by only 56%.

The debt represents spending money we do not have, and the increase in the debt represents the spending of more money we do not have. We simply create it out of thin air to facilitate the process. It doesn't matter what form it takes, whether in the form of Treasury securities or physical money.

Spending go whirr, Fed money machine go whirr, debt go whirr, and eventually inflation go whirr. Inflation is the payback for going into the debt for which we refused to pay at the time.

Debt draws forward prosperity . . .

But it should come as no surprise that the future we robbed has no prosperity in it, now that we have arrived there. 

And people wonder where the inflation came from.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

 

Remember when Biden said that that stuff happens when protesters followed Senator Sinema into the bathroom while she did her business in the stall?

At least he said that was inappropriate.

But now his administration has taken a worse stance, in regard to protesters who are demonstrating in front of the doxxed addresses of the members of the US Supreme Court.

He hasn't called it inappropriate, and officially the administration won't take a position on where protests should and should not occur.

This is the sort of ugliness which leads people to forgo public service, and the worse public officials who replace them to assemble their own security forces.

Private armies can develop that way, which become a threat to the civilized order.

If you think I'm exaggerating the slippery slope here, imagine the guffaws heard all around when I was a kid when occasional firebrands then predicted there would be widespread public vulgarity, pornography, open homosexuality, gay marriage, anti-white racism, trillions of dollars in public debt, hostility to the police, refusal by the authorities to prosecute crimes, complete politicization of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, yada, yada, yada.

The reason they don't teach history much anymore is they don't want you to know how really far we have fallen.

Otherwise you might do something about it.

And we can't have that, now can we?

Protesters march to homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts...

Activists follow Sinema into bathroom...

WH Tacitly Endorses Intimidation of Supreme Court Justices

Joe Concha, The Hill

White House Won't Condemn Doxxing of Supreme Court Justices

Michigan AG Says She Won't Enforce State Abortion Ban If Roe Overturned 

Republicans voted for the Biden infrastructure bill despite the CBO's estimate it would add $250 billion+ to the national debt over 10 years

 Is $25 billion a year a big deal?

We're already paying $500 billion+ EVERY YEAR in interest expense on the debt.

Nobody cares.