[rayiner]

> we instead injected $2 trillion dollars into things like infrastructure (real infrastructure, not GPU warehouses), education, helping out communities ravaged by globalization

Even excluding military spending, US governments spend $2 trillion every 10 weeks.

[ElProlactin]

Just to be clear: you're talking about federal and state non-military spending.

And about 10% of this is interest. So over the course of a year, the US is paying about $1.25 trillion in interest at the federal and state level.

[rayiner]

Why wouldn’t you include state spending? That’s the level of government primarily responsible for infrastructure and education.

[ElProlactin]

I wasn't making a judgment about including or not including state spending. It's just that "US governments" is not a common way for Americans to describe federal and state. People think federal when they see "US government".

[rayiner]

Gotcha. Was being lazy and typing on my phone, sorry.

[nativeit]

How? The annual federal budget is roughly $7T.

[rayiner]

You have to include state and local spending too. We’re at 40% of GDP which works out to almost $13 trillion: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ. Subtract $1 trillion in defense, and we’re spending about $1 trillion a month on government.

[nixon_why69]

Does that chart double-count state transfers to municipalities? When I was in local government, about half our school budget came from the state, so there would be entries on both ledgers.

[raincole]

> governments

Plural implies they count more than the federal government.

[jiggawatts]

Not to mention that data centres are infrastructure!

Other nations are falling behind and will be at a real disadvantage soon.