{"id":66203,"date":"2023-11-22T18:52:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-22T23:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66203"},"modified":"2023-11-22T18:52:00","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T23:52:00","slug":"david-stockman-on-washingtons-fiscal-doomsday-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66203","title":{"rendered":"David Stockman on Washington\u2019s Fiscal Doomsday Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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David Stockman on Washington\u2019s Fiscal Doomsday Machine<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
\"Washington<\/div>\n
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Here\u2019s one that will make your hair stand on end: The US Treasury closed the books on FY 2023, bringing the four-year cumulative deficit to\u00a0$9.0 trillion!<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s right. During the last 1,461 days (FY 2020 thru FY 2023), Uncle Sam has generated\u00a0$6.2 billion\u00a0<\/strong>of red ink each and every day including weekends, holidays and snow-days. For anyone keeping score at home, that\u2019s $4.2 million of red ink per minute.<\/p>\n

For the purpose of perspective, here\u2019s how long it took to generate the first $9 trillion of US government debt:\u00a0It took all of 43 presidents and 219 years to reach $9 trillion of public debt in July 2007.\u00a0<\/strong>So the national debt clock has now accelerated to hyper-drive.<\/p>\n

Market Value of Public Debt Outstanding, 1940 to July 2007<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And, yes, we do mean accelerate. It turns out that when you remove the budgetary Mickey Mouse from the numbers, the federal deficit for FY 2023 clocked in at over $2.0 trillion, or double the comparable level in FY 2022. The reported numbers, of course, do not look quite as alarming, posting at $1.4 trillion last year and $1.7 trillion this year.<\/p>\n

But as The Wall Street Journal cogently explained recently, that comparison is very misleading because it includes a $380 billion budgetary shuffle between the two years. It seems that Sleepy Joe\u2019s student debt cancellation got recorded as a cost in September 2022, but then got canceled by the courts in FY 2023, turning it into a giant \u201csavings\u201d!<\/p>\n

When the Biden administration announced its plan to forgive federal student debt held by 40 million Americans in September 2022, it logged the long-term cost of the program, $379 billion, on the budget all at once, even though effectively no money was spent on it that year\u2026 But in June 2023, the Supreme Court tossed the debt-cancellation program, meaning most of that money wouldn\u2019t actually be spent. Rather than update last year\u2019s deficit numbers, though, the Treasury recorded the changes as a $333 billion spending cut in August 2023.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Stockman on Washington\u2019s Fiscal Doomsday Machine Here\u2019s one that will make your hair stand on end: The US Treasury closed the books on FY 2023, bringing the four-year cumulative deficit to\u00a0$9.0 trillion! That\u2019s right. During the last 1,461 days (FY 2020 thru FY 2023), Uncle Sam has generated\u00a0$6.2 billion\u00a0of red ink each and every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2120,195,2624,380,12584,6228,3053,827,834,2202,865],"class_list":["post-66203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-david-stockman","tag-debt","tag-deficits","tag-government-debt","tag-government-spending","tag-international-man","tag-public-debt","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-us-treasury","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66204,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66203\/revisions\/66204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}