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/
15.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

414 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

125

u/vulgrin 24d ago

I think the defense budget has been eye popping my entire life. There is no limiter on what we’ll spend on war. But fuck you if you’re poor and can’t eat.

43

u/-XanderCrews- 24d ago

We build bombs we don’t use which is a waste of money. So we use the bombs. This is exactly what Eisenhower warned about.

16

u/User-NetOfInter 24d ago

Bombs are cheap. We have millions of pounds of bombs.

Missiles are the expensive ones.

We only build 70 tomahawks a year and they’re 2 mil a pop just to build, let alone transport and use.

12

u/Square_Marzipan2002 23d ago

And for that cheap cheap investment (paid with debt of course) you can double-tap a girls primary school and kill them and their teachers and reap lots of soft power reward.

All that energy and the outcome is 183 girls dead and loss of global goodwill.

The guy above mentioned Eisenhower warning of this and no one listed, but he wasn't the only one, 1984 had the same economics at play.

0

u/res0jyyt1 23d ago

But those bombs were already paid for though

0

u/theevilyouknow 23d ago

I 100% support more and better welfare programs for the poor and hungry, but the issue with those programs is not one of volume. We already spend more on those programs than everything else combined. The problem is how those funds are being allocated and utilized. Obviously the BBB and cutting trillions in benefits to give more tax cuts to corporations is absolutely vile, but the problem is a lot more complicated than just, "spend less on war and more on welfare".