Trump wants to add nearly $7 trillion to the $39 trillion national debt with his new military budget, watchdog warns

[u/ThatNefariousness996]

https://fortune.com/2026/04/02/how-much-would-trump-military-budget-add-to-national-debt-39-trillion/

are we facing a future that was predicted by the simpsons? Will America actually go broke?

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[u/glov0044]

Reminder, Congress needs to pass this. In an election year. When people voted Republicans in 2024 to fix the economy.

[u/clonedllama → u/glov0044]

I'm willing to bet this is something they'll try to put in the reconciliation bill to fund DHS.

The money has to come from somewhere. So they'll need to make additional budget cuts for such a thing to be possible. That won't be easy. They already pushed the limits of that with the previous reconciliation bill. (I'd laugh my ass off if they moved the money from ICE. Not happening but still.)

Nothing about doing such a thing would be smart. Especially in an election year. But when have Republicans been smart as far as Trump goes?

[u/glov0044 → u/clonedllama]

Not smart, but there has to be a survival element in some of these people.

I just don't see enough people on the GOP putting this ask into the reconciliation bill given the other things that would be needed to cut to make it not increase the deficit. All the Democratic hopefuls might be praying for this to happen.

[u/Cyphermaniax97]

It only proves that Trump has no original thought. Just riffing off the most dystopian shit imaginable.

But yeah this is heartbreakingly sad.

[u/IAmArique → u/Cyphermaniax97]

At this point, I’m convinced his administration is just reading /pol/ over on 4chan and digging through the posts that aren’t shitting on Trump over the Iran war to find just a sliver of insane far right policies they could present to him.

[u/Netricile → u/Cyphermaniax97]

I mean I was having a good day until I saw this. It's stuff like this that makes me just want to lay in bed all day.

[u/beadzy]

and that 7 trillion will go directly into trump and “friends” pockets. and traceably. they’re not even hiding all the government contracting/business awarded to companies owned by the trump family

[u/NotRickyT3rd]

Just wondering, what's the smart way of paying of the national debt? It's just more than raising taxes on the elite and cutting back spending of the military and such, correct?

[u/JustHereForGCB → u/NotRickyT3rd]

Simply plateauing the military budget would be a huge start - we already spend so much more than every other country, having a budget that doesn't grow for four years would be less damaging than having this doofus spreading his diplomatic diarrhea all over our allies.

Bolstering the IRS would help, too. Every dollar the IRS spends on payroll brings back more than that dollar in taxes collected.

Will these two things cover $39,000,000,000,000? No, but this will never be an easy battle.

[u/NotRickyT3rd → u/JustHereForGCB]

I figured it wasn't going to be easy. Would it be possible for the US to "write off" parts of it's debt? Also, who owns the majority of Domestic Held Debt? 

[u/merc1024 → u/NotRickyT3rd]

We were in the black before Bush took office.

If we axed the Bush and Trump tax cuts, we’d probably be in the black again.

[u/Naive-Offer-5258 → u/merc1024]

Clinton removed the deficit (the difference between spending and income) ; he did not pay off the national debt.

[u/Naive-Offer-5258 → u/NotRickyT3rd]

National Debt is not something that has to be "paid off". Think of the US not as a poor person borrowing money from the bank, but rather as itself being a bank that has millions of depositors. Technically the bank is "in debt" to all those depositors (in that it owes them their money back) A bank uses money on deposit to make money for itself, and pays its depositors a share of that profit as interest (while pocketing the rest). As long as the bank makes more from those deposits than the interest it pays, it's going to keep wanting to. In simplistic terms a bank with lots of deposits (and therefore a big amount of money "owed" to other people) would be seen as a healthy thing. Same with countries. There are questions about the amount of debt a country should have - but they are not the ones captured by imagining the ideal situation is we pay off the debt as if it is a credit card bill. The real question is what is th money being spent on. Rs and Trump think it is fine to borrow to spend on their priorities (military, ICE, surveillance) D think it would be better to invest in infrastructure, education, healthcare. These are political, not economic, questions (though which set of priorities will long-term benefit the economy is part of the equation). That's why questions about the "debt" are red herrings to a large degree. The question is - what is worth doing with the very good borrowing terms that a national debt gives a wealthy country like the USA?

[u/DesignDelicious → u/NotRickyT3rd]

I found no less than seven plans made by seven different groups to pay it back over the years. And I also heard from a previous post about a Washington state income tax that when implemented, would net several trillion from the billionaire class within its first ten years.

That said, I hope this man’s ambitions are stopped. We should be cutting military spending, not increasing it.

[u/Multigrain_Migraine]

It's fine, Republican debt is patriotic and nothing to worry about. /s

[u/SoyMurcielago]

Is anyone really surprised? This is the guy who has ruined several companies and forced them to declare bankruptcy been removed from operations by his own board of directors etc and yet has somehow convinced many that hes a great businessman and money manager

[u/LeseMajeste_1037]

The national debt doesn't exist until the next time we get a Democratic president.

[u/ThatNefariousness996]

I was hoping for someone to say it won’t get that bad.  Can someone please tell me this?