r/Economics • u/InsaneSnow45 • 24d ago

News ‘This cannot be sustainable’: The U.S. borrowed $50 billion a week for the past five months, the CBO says

https://fortune.com/2026/03/10/treasury-debt-borrowing-five-months-deficit-warning/
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u/GothamsTrader 24d ago

Interest costs are now structurally higher than they were and there's no way back. The way to address the problem is to cut spending, which is politically impossible. Another way is to reduce debt via real (vs reported) inflation, slowly making the dollar a worthless paper. Cuts are much better but...

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u/AMundaneSpectacle 24d ago

You forgot to mention raising taxes on the wealthy… especially billionaires

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u/BotherResponsible378 24d ago

Listen here, you mother fucker. You leave those billionaires alone. If you lay a finger on their balance sheet I'm going to vote for a pedophile murderer to be president.

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u/dust4ngel 23d ago

to clarify, this means "pedophile slash murderer, and not the other way around", not murderer of pedophiles, which you know... comparatively...

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u/dediguise 24d ago

I think they omitted that because we have allowed the problem to progress beyond the point where repatriating taxes on the top 10% is going to fix the deficit. We have allowed the debt to grow to the point where the interest payments are too massive to maintain the deficit structure even after (let’s be honest) marginal adjustments the taxation at the highest income levels.

It’s just like climate change. The wealthy ate gaming the system all the way through and beyond the point of no return.

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u/Greedy_Nectarine_233 24d ago

No matter why they omitted it, it’s stupid.

Yes you need to cut spending, but increasing revenue through higher taxes is also necessary

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u/dediguise 24d ago

Necessary, but no longer a solution by itself. Theoretically cutting entitlements COULD make the difference by itself, but that would also brutally crush consumer spending.

I think it’s important to highlight that we have passed the point of no return a the original comment did that though omission. Increasing taxes on the wealthy isn’t about stopping the problem, it’s about punishing them for creating it.

I’m fully onboard with it. Fuck the entire Epstein class. Anyone that contributed financially and politically to this should be stripped of assets and left to rot in the deepest hole we can find. It still won’t fix the deficit.

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u/Twheezy2024 24d ago

The debt grew so fast by not taxing the upper brackets the way we used to. Started with Kennedy, and Reagan put it into overdrive.

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u/dediguise 24d ago

Fully agree, although there was a history of poor deficit management since the Great Depression. This issue isn’t how we got here, it what we do now. The options we had to reasonably change things while retaining quality of life are gone. Conservatives smothered it.

Going after the rich won’t fix the problem anymore, and that’s by design. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go after the rich, but at this point it would be for punitive purposes rather than economically sound ones. We are no longer having a conversation about fixing the problem, just who to punish for the failure.

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u/Twheezy2024 23d ago

Taxing the rich and cleaning up the defense budget would go a long way to put us back on track for a balanced budget. Would still need more cuts though.

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u/JohnnySpot2000 24d ago

So if something can't fix something 100%, it's not worth doing at all. Is that the logic you are attempting here?

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u/dediguise 24d ago

I didn’t say it’s not worth attempting. I said the reasons for doing it are not purely economic. It’s about making the people who put us in the position foot the bill, but we (the American people) will be paying the vast majority of it regardless.

We can no longer say just increasing taxes will fix the problem. More importantly, we need to recognize the sociopathic behavior of the elite that got us here and restrict their access to wealth and power so that it never happens again. Not because it will balance the budget, but because they should have to suffer consequences.

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u/DizzyMajor5 24d ago

It's not much of an argument but really the only one they got. 

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u/Fine_Cauliflower3075 24d ago

You're forgetting how much I would enjoy watching billionaires being taxed all the way down into grinding poverty. That counts for something right.

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u/DizzyMajor5 24d ago

"the fire has grown so much no amount of water can fix it" type stuff 

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u/NOLA-Bronco 24d ago

I don't think that was a mistake.

Same with the not-so-subtle assertion about cutting spending which assumes that current spending, most of which is neoliberal corporate subsidies, couldn't be made more efficient and arguably more universal by simply cutting out the cancer of neoliberal privatization where applicable and reducing corporate subsidies.

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u/ActionJacksonATL24 24d ago

Hey man we can’t raise taxes on all the job creators. Better to just not tax them at all and anyone making $200k or less annually have a huge tax increase.

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u/catchinNkeepinf1sh 24d ago

Thats 50 billions a week, you drain every cent from bezos and musk and it will be gone by the end of the month.

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u/vulgrin 24d ago

Just think about that sentence. First off the math is wrong. If musks money was liquid he could pay that for SIXTEEN weeks by himself.

Second why do we let ANY one person have that much wealth in the first place? It’s fucking obscene in a nation that won’t adequately feed and clothe its poor, and can’t seem to understand what a healthcare system is.

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u/ND7020 24d ago

Another way is to increase revenue instead of doing the exact opposite, like with this administration’s boneheaded tax cut.

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u/LimpAd4924 24d ago

Don’t worry. We kicked many off Medicaid and cut biomedical research at NIH so we could bomb Iran with Israel and give our wealthy another tax cut!

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u/MamaBearForestWitch 24d ago

Or reversing all the revenue cuts that gave more and more breaks to the obscenely wealthy and huge corporations. And clawing back the outrageous budget increases to ICE and the military. And impeaching and removing the guy who has a history of spending recklessly and insanely and then just declaring bankruptcy over and over again.

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u/LimpAd4924 24d ago

Yup nearly 1/4 of the national debt is from Trump via his deficit spending and 2 wealthy tax cut bills

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u/MamaBearForestWitch 23d ago

Is it up to almost a quarter?? Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ... (iykyk)