[brightball]

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.

[enragedcacti]

> - 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.

[magicalist]

>> 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?

[bhouston]

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.

[rawgabbit]

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.

[conductr]

This ball is already in motion IMO. Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun.

[bhouston]

> 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.

[toomuchtodo]

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/...

[bhouston]

> 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=...

[toomuchtodo]

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