[SavageBeast]

"I'm always surprised to see a fair amount of support for DOGE here. I'd love to understand why these people think this is OK."

So consider the guy who makes $100k/year and spends $200k/year. Over the course of enough years what must inevitably happen here?

I think making financial decisions to avoid what amounts to bankruptcy is OK.

Now, the US wont ever go "bankrupt" or "default" of course, but it will absolutely print money to service the debt on its bonds. Bond holders tend not to like that and sooner or later will demand higher payments in exchange for the use of their money thus increasing our "minimum monthly payment" on our giant credit card.

Sooner or later we get to a death spiral situation - nobody knows when that will be or what set of circumstances will trigger it - and when/if it does finally happen it will somehow take everyone by surprise. Nothing is so surprising as the inevitable when it finally occurs.

[jay_kyburz]

Oh yeah, I'm fully on board with budget surpluses. Apparently here in Australia we have have a surplus about half of the time.

But I would have thought there would be a less chaotic way to go about it.

[SavageBeast]

Surplus? LOL!! If we cut a massive $1T from our nearly $2T deficit every year that would be considered a radical success. Thats how screwed up things are. Nobody is even talking about a BUDGET SURPLUS here. Sometimes I don't think people realistically see how deep the hole is.

As for a less chaotic way to go about it, both Democrats and Republicans have been screaming about a balanced budget for as long as I can remember (Im not young) and now we finally have someone willing to attack the problem seriously.

I mean we all know how to do it, simply cut THE OTHER GUYS programs and then we can afford OUR programs. Simple right? What we have here is a Republican administration deciding where to make cuts and a Democratic party unhappy about it. Donald Trump could literally save planet earth and the democratic party wouldn't have a nice word to say about him. This is the exactly how the Republican party treated President Obama for 8 years.

The US is very backwards in a lot of important ways. Since you're in Australia it might be hard for you to see but about half the country is perfectly happy with whats going on and they knowingly voted for exactly this. Its not a surprise this is happening and if anything is surprising about it a politician is actually doing the thing he promised to do.

The complaints and panic energy you see around this topic seems to stem from the fact that the Republican party has the executive branch and both chambers of congress in addition to a sympathetic supreme court (read FULL CONTROL). The party in power today can more or less do whatever it wants and the opposing party can only make complaints among themselves while mounting literally any legal challenge they can come up with in hopes of slowing the process down.

[tssva]

We started having budget surpluses during the Clinton administration and paying down the national debt. Republicans regained control of congress and swiftly put an end to it because obviously if have enough money to pay down the debt taxes are too high.

[cmurf]

Congress alone has the power of the purse per the Constitution. The idea the executive has absolute discretion to ignore statutes is absurd.

You either support the Constitution and the republic. The unitary executive types, and most especially those who encourage ignoring the courts, stand in opposition to both.

By the way. What did Trump promise about Russia and Ukraine? Did he promise to lie about Ukraine starting the war? Call a democratic ally a dictator while formalizing negotiations with war criminals who published a genocide handbook stating their clear intent? Do you suppose Americans expect Trump give Putin everything he wants without preconditions or expecting anything in return? That's what he's doing.

Pretty sure Americans weren't expecting Trump to promise invasion of Canada, Greenland or Panama either.