39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for...
- spending cuts
- stopping fraud
- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars
- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster.
It's not going to be fun.
Also please add as an option: raise taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations back.
https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora...
This is really ambiguous:
"- stopping fraud"
And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people.
I find this to be mostly a distraction:
"- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars"
We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US.
This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings:
"- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs"
I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.
“Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.
We have nearly doubled the federal budget over 10 years. It is a spending problem and a spending problem alone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650
This presumes that federal spending is a bad thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650
> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
>> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
> Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days.
Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time.
Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?
If you gave a snap quiz to all Trump voters asking whether the cost of the Iran War or the DOGE cuts were greater, I wonder how many would get the right answer.
> despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that
a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government.
Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.
Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.
> hundreds of thousands of dead people
No reports have substantiated this talking point to my knowledge.
https://www.impactcounter.com/ explains their methodology.
Well they certainly had enough power to fuck a lot of shit up, if not enough power to meaningfully impact the budget deficit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650
EDIT: I see several comments suggesting that there is nothing left to cut. I'm not sure how anyone squares that perspective with this federal budget growth chart.
The federal budget over time...
2026 - $7.5 trillion
2020 - $4.8 trillion
2015 - $3.9 trillion
2010 - $3.7 trillion
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND
We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal government shouldn't be able to operate on a budget equivalent of about $4 trillion which was just about the average from 2010-2020. There seems to be quite a lot available to cut.
You should leave Social Security out of the calculations. It's supposed to be a self-funding program that has no impact on budget balance. That accounts for ~$0.5 trillion of the growth since 2020.
Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments.
A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020.
Then there is healthcare spending, which can be expected to grow faster than inflation, as the population is growing older.
The US is basically running into the same issues as European welfare states. While government spending remains qualitatively the same, demographic changes make it grow faster than tax revenue. Those who couldn't maintain a balanced budget in the past are finding the situation particularly difficult. In some sense, the situation is even worse in the US. Healthcare (old age spending) is particularly expensive, while individuals have greater responsibility for childhood expenses.
That’s different than saying there’s a lot of “waste” to cut as many argue.
The benefits agencies that make up the bulk of the spending have very low overhead and are run very efficiently. The vast majority of funds go directly to beneficiaries.
Balancing the budget will require massive cuts to very popular programs.
This ball is already in motion IMO. Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun.
> Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun
For inflation to have an impact on the US debt, it has to be approaching the level at which the US debt is increasing. In the last year, the US debt increased by 7.6%, much higher than inflation.
From what I observe from fraud and corruption witch-hunts, they are nothing more than that. The real fraud is that government that is supposed to serve the people who elected it serves everyone else first.
There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value.
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...
> There is nothing left to cut
Hmm.... I found this, I wonder if there is any way this line item in the budget could be reduced, it looks sort of big:
https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...
Correction accepted. Eight failed audits. Would love to see the will to fix this specific item, but am not confident it exists. We spent hundreds of billions on war with Iran before we forgave student loan debt and instituted Medicare for All, for example. The evidence is clear these are active choices we can make. We actively choose the bad financial policy choices through governance outcomes.
The only branch of government I have faith in at the moment is the bond market.
Pentagon fails financial audit for 8th year in a row - https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12... - December 19th, 2025
Fact Check: Has the Pentagon failed its 7th audit in a row? - https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-... - December 20th, 2024
Thoughts From the Bond Vigilantes - https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-... - December 9th, 2024
The Iran War spending is staggering but still not enough to cover Medicare for All, even for a single year.
Maybe the ENTIRE defense budget would cover it.
The US spends ~$1.1T/year on Medicare today. US health care spending is estimated to continue rising and will reach nearly $6T a year by 2027. That means according to the federal government, the US will spend around $42.9T on health care over the next decade if we maintain the status quo. A recent study by Yale epidemiologists found that Medicare for All would save around 68k lives a year while reducing U.S. health care spending by around 13%, or $450B a year.
(for comparison, the DoD consumes ~$1T of spending, and debt interest costs ~$867B, annually as of this comment)
Citations:
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-medicare-cost-the...
https://www.citizen.org/news/fact-check-medicare-for-all-wou...
https://www.crfb.org/papers/choices-financing-medicare-all
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3106.html
https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/fiscal-policy/mon...
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/interest-expense-avg-interes...
From the cfrb link the cost of Medicare for All would be $2.5T to $3.5T per year.
So the entire defense budget would not cover it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650
The average federal budget from 2010 to 2020 was $4 trillion. This year it is $7.5 trillion. There's quite a lot to cut.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-of-the-federal-budget...
> The US government spent $6.2 trillion in total in 2023, with $1.7 trillion on discretionary spending, $3.8 trillion on mandatory spending, and $659 billion on net interest. Discretionary spending includes funding for defense, education, transportation, and scientific research. Approximately half of federal discretionary spending is allocated to defense.
So I suppose I would agree with your assertion that there is a lot to cut if we're talking about cutting defense spending and interest on the debt via more taxes to pay down the debt (to reduce forward debt servicing obligations). Can't keep cutting taxes for the wealthy with the expectation that is going to reduce spending or increase overall federal tax income, as the evidence shows it will not.
Per the link you provided https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
2024 - $6.8 trillion in spending
$1.3 trillion Defense, $323 billion of which is veteran support (pensions, retirement, medicare, etc).
Discretionary spending is a misnomer that assumes all of the other spending levels just have to be maintained as is, are without fraud, run efficiently and impossible to reform.
Cut 20% across the board from every agency for starters (including Defense). That gets us back from $7.5 trillion to $6 trillion. Then do it again 2 years later and get us back to $4.8 trillion. Then do it again.
States have limited budgets and must balance it all the time. Companies as well. There's no reason the federal government cannot do exactly the same thing.
"Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago and this idea of raising taxes more on those people wouldn't even begin to address the spending problem.
> Discretionary spending is a misnomer that assumes all of the other spending levels just have to be maintained as is, are without fraud, run efficiently and impossible to reform.
We disagree on the fundamental problem, and I believe your solution is wildly irresponsible to "just keep cutting 20%." You say fraud; prove the fraud. DOGE couldn't find any, so "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Fraud has a very clear definition versus "spending I do not like or approve of."
The $21.7 Billion Blunder: New PSI Report Reveals Billions in Taxpayer Dollars Squandered by DOGE - https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/... - July 21st, 2025 (Report [pdf]: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025-07-31-M...)
The reality of DOGE's mediocre savings - https://fordschool.umich.edu/news/2025/reality-doges-mediocr... - February 25th, 2025
DOGE and “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse” - https://www.cato.org/blog/doge-waste-fraud-abuse - February 20th, 2025
> "Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago and this idea of raising taxes more on those people wouldn't even begin to address the spending problem.
I mean, this is the government they created over decades, including influencing elections through dark money spending, and they have all the wealth. Tax cuts for the wealthy are a material component of the debt the US carries today. Where else would we get it from? More tax and spending cuts? This is very unlikely, feel free to confirm with an NGO like USAFacts or Brookings on the topic.
How four decades of tax cuts fueled inequality - https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/t... - November 29th, 2022
Popular support is very high for taxing the wealthy more, ~80% as of this comment in some cases.
Most Americans continue to favor raising taxes on corporations, higher-income households - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-amer... - March 19th, 2025
>"Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago
But... They did. Who do you think wanted Trump's tax cuts on wealthy businesses?
Who do you think pushed for Reagan's tax cuts on wealthy businesses while also drastically increasing defense spending?
Who do you think still is pushing reduced taxes for wealthy businesses?
"We've cut all taxes from the wealthy and the tax number keeps going down, what can we possibly do?"