quote:

Originally posted by HuskySig:

quote:

Originally posted by newtoSig765:
If I was wealthy, I'd move everything offshore until Trump starts accomplishing his most serious goals, starting with draining the swamp.

I think you’re being overly optimistic. Nine months from now the big spending republicans are going to lose their grip on the senate and their healthy majority in the house. Trump will have two or six years where all legislation will be held up by gridlock. His agenda is effectively stall out.

I'm not ready to give up hope in Trump. Of course, I'm also not wealthy!

quote:

Originally posted by Surefire:
Serious point though - the massive debt increase under obama has had what negative impact? To you or I, doubling our debt would be crippling, so when does it become a problem for government?

When people (particularly in other countries) stop accepting dollars. Our finances aren’t pretty, but what other major currency is less ugly? As ugly as our balance sheet is, as long as we are the least ugly there are unlikely to be major changes.

Edited to fix “currencies is”. Currencies are, currency is. My English teacher would shudder.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: slosig,

quote:

Originally posted by Southflorida-law:

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:
It's not an entitlement if you have paid more in than you get out of it.

Hate to burst your bubble, but SS and Medicare/Medicaid are spending more than they are "making". Therefore, methinks, your math (or whomever's you are using) is a tad off.

But, since you used CNN, here is a counter to your assumption.

http://www.politifact.com/trut...at-you-paid-what-yo/

Demographics count. When the baby boomers were working, paying SS taxes and funding the SS payments to a smaller generation, that worked pretty well. As the baby boomers start to retire and a smaller following generation is asked to fund the baby boomers’ SS checks, the math just doesn’t work. I think I read somewhere (but have no clue where and I may have it all puzzled up anyway) that it take three workers paying SS taxes to pay one retiree’s SS check. This may be totally false, but it sounds about right for a government program.

Paul took to Face the Nation this weekend to explain and defend his decision to hold up the vote and trigger another government shutdown - even if it only lasted a few hours.

I voted for the tax cuts and I voted for spending cuts. The people who voted for tax cuts and spending increases. I think there is some hypocrisy there and it shows they're not serious about the debt. But all throughout my career I've always voted for spending cuts and I'm happy to offset cuts in taxes with cuts in spending. So no I think that I've had a consistent position in being very concerned about the debt and I want to shrink the size of government. So, the reason I'm for tax cuts is I to return more of the money to the people who own that who- who actually deserve to have their money returned to them. But it also shrinks the size of government by cutting taxes or should if you cut spending at the same time.

Of course, traders have already experienced the spike, or at least a part of it: it's one of the key catalysts that moved the 10Y from 2.60% to 2.90% since payrolls Friday (coupled with the inflationary impulse from the jump in hourly wages).

Earlier in the day, Mulvaney spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” a day before the White House is expected to release 2019 spending proposals - and after weeks in which financial markets have been spooked by prospects for rising inflation tied to higher deficits and lower taxes.

“This is not a fiscal stimulus; it’s not a sugar high,” Mulvaney said on of the president’s economic program, including the $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in late 2017. “If we can keep the economy humming and generate more money for you and me and for everybody else, then government takes in more money and that’s how we hope to be able to keep the debt under control,” Mulvaney said.

In a separate interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Mulvaney said rising budget deficits are “a very dangerous idea, but it’s the world we live in.”

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As Bloomberg notes, his comment echoed Trump’s Feb. 9 tweet that Republicans “were forced to increase spending on things we do not like or want” to secure Democratic votes for the sharp buildup in military spending wanted by the White House and the Pentagon.

“What they said was they would not give us a single additional dollar for defense unless we gave them dollars for social programs,” he said. “They held the Defense Department hostage, and we had to pay that ransom.”

Shockingly, Mulvaney also acknowledged he would “probably not” have voted for the deal when he served in the House of Representatives and was known as a fiscal hawk. "Keep in mind I’m not Congressman Mick Mulvaney anymore," he said. "My job as the director of the Office of Management Budget is to try to get the President's agenda passed."

* * *

The next set of numbers - and potential catalyst for further rate upside - will be unveiled on Monday, when Mulvaney's OMB will updating the 2018 budget released last year and its 2019 request, due Monday, in response to the two-year budget deal the president signed into law on Friday morning. That agreement, which ended an hours-long partial government shutdown, will boost government spending by another $300 billion, which will have to be directly funded with more debt. Mulvaney said that in his previous job as a fiscally-conservative congressman representing South Carolina, he would “probably not” have voted for the bill.

The additional spending could increase the deficit to about $1.2 trillion in 2019, and there’s a risk that interest rates “will spike” as a result, Mulvaney said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...pike-soaring-deficit

Same shit different day. Just ludicrous. If any of us were fleecing our local community for a free ride, keeping your house, your vehicle, as you rack up a million dollars in debt which your neighbors have to pay for, you’d probably be murdered in your sleep.

The Republicans failed again and look like hypocrites. What part of conservative, and fiscal conservative do they not understand? You can’t just keep kicking the can down the street. Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost.
The house of cards will fall eventually and it won’t be good for us citizens. They spend money like fools and the taxpayers will be responsible for paying the bills, the debt, the interest.

Terrible shit and needs to be called out. We call out the liberals when they’re in power and pull this so we must call out our own.

The budget is not capable of being addressed adequately when there was no budget under Obama because Reid couldn't muster the votes and so we received ongoing continued resolutions that just preserved the status quo.

The problem is that you need a transition from the people that passed these CRs and no party has the votes to do anything. While it appears that it's business as usual, without a budget of sorts there's no skeleton to hang the meat from.

It will take a while for the Trump tax cuts to take full effect and the influence on the revenues won't be seen j for a number of months. In the interim you simply cannot shut down the government because you did not get today want you well may get tomorrow. The Republicans need to get the skekton standing up and putting some meat on it before November and the signs point to that happening, Ryan and McConnell not withstanding.

It took a long time to fill the swamp and we must give the system time and tools to drain it.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
That agreement, which ended an hours-long partial government shutdown, will boost government spending by another $300 billion, which will have to be directly funded with more debt.

Does anyone know what the $300 billion a year will be spent on?

quote:

Originally posted by deepocean:
Does anyone know what the $300 billion a year will be spent on?

The two-year budget deal would lift caps on defense and non-defense spending by $300 billion over two years. It also includes: $6 billion to fight the opioid crisis; $5.8 billion for child care development block grants;$4 billion for veterans medical facilities; $2 billion for medical research; $20 billion to augment existing infrastructure programs; and $4 billion for college affordability.

"Have They All Lost Their Collective Minds?"

Have they all lost their collective minds? Look I get that some people are leaning Democrat versus Republican and vice versa and that’s fine, but what exactly are voters getting? If, on the one hand, you think Democrats tax and spend too much you get Republicans on the other hand who cut taxes with disproportional benefit to the top 1% and then spend even more. Fiscal conservatives? Please.

In early February the US government was already scheduled to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year.

A week later and that figure is already out the door as this week both parties agreed to expand spending caps seemingly preparing for World War III. An incremental hundreds of billions of dollars to the military budget alone in just 2 years. What for? To what end? It’s a bonanza for defense contractors surely and the president apparently wants a parade, but have we entered the math no longer applies zone?

2019? Looks lot be $1.4 Trillion.

I didn’t see these figures mentioned in any campaign brochures have you? And this is all pre-recession folks. We get a recession and you are looking at 2-3 trillion dollar deficits.

Think I’m going hyperbole on you?

Watch this: Here’s a chart I posted back in 2016 when I called all this Empty Promises. Look at what the CBO then had projected in terms of coming deficits for 2018 and 2019:



I spot roughly $500B for 2018 and a little over $600B in 2019. Now we’re looking at figures double these for the same time frame and that’s ASSUMING the rosy growth forecasts they’ve all baked into these forecasts come to fruition.

These numbers don’t represent a slight increase, they represent a deficit explosion and the CBO forecast from 2016 for the 10 years into 2026 are already hopelessly outdated. At the current rate we’ll be hitting $24 trillion by the next presidential election.

In case nobody has noticed: Rates are going higher and any new borrowing will be at higher rates and old debt will have to be refinanced at higher rates. Reduce tax revenues in the process and you end up with a fiscal disaster.

Indeed rising interest payments will represent the fastest growth line item in the US budget:

“Interest On The Debt Will Be The Fastest Growing Part Of The Federal Budget... By Far.
Forget Medicare, Social Security and the Pentagon: $1 trillion-plus deficits means massive increases in the national debt and that debt will have to be borrowed at higher interest rates (see #1). Add the need for the Treasury to roll-over existing debt at higher and higher rates and you get an immediate increase in the amount the U.S. will need to spend on interest each year.”



https://www.zerohedge.com/news...eir-collective-minds

Were the increased tax revenues estimated to come in from the tax cuts estimated to be greater or less than $300 billion?

The media in 3 tweets...

quote:

The media in 3 tweets...

That's pretty funny. Ya, the media is consumed by hatred for Trump....

My concern is with the Republicans.
All spending bills originate in the House. The President doesn't decide how much to spend, Congress does. The President executes the law, as enacted by Congress. It's popular fiction to credit or blame the President (either Bush, Obama, or Trump) with the spending.

Sure, the President may send a budget to Congress, but it's more a 'wish list' than anything else.

The Republicans told us that they were opposed to big government and deficit spending... if we elected them they would get it under control.
It's a lie. Mitch McConnell and the boys want to spend money just like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi...

Do you remember Newt's Contract with America?
That was in 1994. It was the last serious attempt at fiscal responsibility in America.

Less than two weeks ago, the United States Department of Treasury very quietly released its own internal projections for the federal government’s budget deficits over the next several years.

And the numbers are pretty gruesome.

In order to plug the gaps from its soaring deficits, the Treasury Department expects to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year.

Then nearly $1.1 trillion next fiscal year.

And up to $1.3 trillion the year after that.

This means that the national debt will exceed $25 trillion by September 30, 2020.

Remember, this isn’t some wild conspiracy theory. These are official government projections published by the United States Department of Treasury.

This story alone is monumental– not only does the US owe, by far, the greatest amount of debt ever accumulated by a single nation in human history, but $25 trillion is larger than the debts of every other nation in the world combined.

But there are other themes at work here that are even more important.

For example– how is it remotely possible that the federal government can burn through $1 trillion?

Everything is supposedly totally awesome in the United States. The economy is strong, unemployment is low, tax revenue is at record levels.

It’s not like they had to fight a major two front war, save the financial system from an epic crisis, or battle a severe economic depression.

It’s just been business as usual. Nothing really out of the ordinary.

And yet they’re still losing trillions of dollars.

This is pretty scary when you think about it. What’s going to happen to the US federal deficit when there actually IS a financial crisis or major recession?

And none of those possibilities are factored into their projections.
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The largest problem of all, though, is that the federal government is going to have a much more difficult time borrowing the money.

For the past several years, the government has always been able to rely on the usual suspects to loan them money and buy up all the debt, namely– the Federal Reserve, the Chinese, and the Japanese.

Those three alone have loaned trillions of dollars to the US government since the end of the financial crisis.

The Federal Reserve in particular, through its “Quantitative Easing” programs, was on an all-out binge, buying up every long-dated Treasury Bond it could find, like some sort of junkie debt addict.

And both Chinese and Japanese holdings of US government debt now exceed $1 trillion each, more than double what they were before the 2008 crisis.

But now each of those three lenders is out of the game.

The Federal Reserve has formally ended its Quantitative Easing program. In other words, the Fed has said it will no longer conjure money out of thin air to buy US government debt.

The Chinese government said point blank last month that they were ‘rethinking’ their position on US government debt.

And the Japanese have their own problems at home to deal with; they need to scrap together every penny they can find to dump into their own economy.

Official data from the US Treasury Department illustrates this point– both China and Japan have slightly reduced their holdings of US government debt since last summer.

Bottom line, all three of the US government’s biggest lenders are no longer buyers of US debt.

There’s a pretty obvious conclusion here: interest rates have to rise.

It’s a simple issue of supply and demand. The supply of debt is rising. Demand is falling.

This means that the ‘price’ of debt will decrease, ergo interest rates will rise.

(Think about it like this– with so much supply and lower demand for its debt, the US government will have to pay higher interest rates in order to attract new lenders.)

Make no mistake: higher interest rates will have an enormous impact on just about EVERYTHING.

Many major asset prices tend to fall when interest rates rise.

Rising rates mean that it costs more money for companies to borrow, reducing their leverage and overall profitability. So stock prices typically fall.

It’s also important to note that, over the last several years when interest rates were basically ZERO, companies borrowed vast sums of money at almost no cost to buy back their own stock.

They were essentially using record low interest rates to artificially inflate their share prices.

Those days are rapidly coming to an end.

Property prices also tend to do poorly when interest rates rise.

Here’s a simplistic example: if you can afford the monthly mortgage payment to buy a $500,000 house when interest rates are 3%, that same monthly payment will only buy a $250,000 house when rates rise to 6%.

Rising rates mean that people won’t be able to borrow as much money to buy a home, and this typically causes property prices to fall.

Of course, higher interest rates also mean that the US government will take a major hit.

Remember that the federal government already has to borrow money just to pay interest on the money they’ve already borrowed.

So as interest rates go up, they’ll be paying even more each year in interest payments… which means they’ll have to borrow even more money to make those payments, which means they’ll be paying even more in interest payments, which means they’ll have to borrow even more, etc. etc.

It’s a pretty nasty cycle.

Finally, the broader US economy will likely take a hit with rising interest rates.

As we’ve discussed many times before, the US economy is based on consumption, not production, and it depends heavily on cheap money (i.e. lower interest rates), and cheap oil, in order to keep growing.

We’re already seeing the end of both of those, at least for now.

Both oil prices and interest rates have more than doubled from their lows, and it stands to reason that, at a minimum, interest rates will keep climbing.

So this may very well be the start of the great financial reckoning.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...-financial-reckoning