Yesterday, August 19th 2026, marked a milestone as the U.S. officially hit $40 trillion in national “debt”. That’s $40,000,000,000,000.
That is a pretty big number.
I put “debt” in quotes, and assume those for the rest of the post, because debt is something you owe and in general it is expected you will repay. No one has seriously believed the U.S. would repay the debt, not ever.
Without going into a Ron Paul-esque screed about fiat currency not backed by anything more substantial than “Trust us bro”, the ugly reality of money is that it is entirely a fiction. A dollar bill is worth a dollar because we all agree that it does. The money held in checking accounts is completely imaginary. For the average person virtually all of their transactions, from getting your paycheck to buying groceries to paying bills, happens via a series of electronic transactions. Most of us don’t even pay taxes in the sense of writing out a check, it is taken magically from our imaginary paycheck.
Now I am not suggesting we return to a strictly barter economy of course. The use of a medium of exchange like money is easier than some guy showing up with a truck full of boards to trade for a truck full of corn. The problem is that so much spending is done via funds that just don’t exist.
This is accelerating at the Federal level. I had Grok make me a chart of the national debt over the last 25 years.
We first hit $10 trillion in debt in 2008. To add another $10 trillion in debt, doubling to $20 trillion, took 9 years in 2017.
The next $10 trillion debt milestone happened around 2021, so only 4 years thanks to “pandemic” spending.
To get from $30 trillion to $40 trillion took right around 5 years.
In 2008, not that long ago by my reckoning, the U.S. was “only” $10 trillion in debt but today is quadruple that figure.
Also worth pointing out, DOGE notwithstanding, Donald Trump has overseen more “money” added to the national debt that any other President to the tune of $11.6 trillion and he still has a couple of years to go….
A very significant percentage of that debt was created in the service of outright fraud, including and especially in the military as our trillion dollar a year armed forces have been basically run out of the Middle East by Iran.
A question I have asked before….since Federal spending has absolutely no relationship to tax revenue, why bother collecting taxes at all? Why not just keep spending imaginary “money” and adding to the national debt to pay for government spending?
The answer is pretty obvious: taxing your income is a way to siphon from the productive class, bringing them down to the level of the dependency class. It isn’t really about “paying your fair share” or “equity”. It is just punishment for being a kulak.
There is nothing to be done about the national debt. It will keep swelling and interest payments will keep taking an increasing share of the “budget” so they will borrow to pay the interest and on and on. The only question is when does the end come and who will be left with a chair?
It ends when China calls in our loans. The repayment will be enslavement. Thirteenth amendment – what’s that?
A conflict with China might be coming sooner rather than later.
Art,
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re : our West Taiwanese adversaries
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* The chins are inbred xenophobic inbred half-wit inbred xenophobes.
* The chin ‘students’ ‘studying’ in American universities are consistently corrupted by our wonderful variety of non-rice non-soy foods, made without rice and soy.
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Getting a few billion chins worked-up about going on a suicidal invasion halfway around the planet while they can guzzle chin-beer and watch chin-sports 24/7 on the chin-telly?
Not saying it couldn’t happen.
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keyword : xenophobic (terrified of anybody outside TheGreatWallOfChins)
China holds less than 700B worth of treasuries. (down from about 1.5T the last few years) Even Japan only holds 1.2T.
The UST just issued a trillion bucks worth of bills/notes/bonds in less than 3 months. China selling all theirs at once wouldn’t even make a dent.
I believe Japan owns more of our debt than China. I big ripple could be when the Japanese bond market takes a dump
How do you get out of this mess? You do not. If the Golden Golem and his SecTreas devaluate the dollar, all hell will break loose. The Sheeple, Normies, Cucks, Mall Zombies, and Remoras are still able to use their debt bucks for the bread and circuses lifestyles they have been enjoying since before Y2K. Weimar 2.0 is about to make landfall. Plan accordingly. Proverbs 27:12.
That is the real red pill most people still refuse to swallow: you cannot fix this mess. There is no solution, no politician who can figure it out. You just have to ride out what is coming.
Gold and metals on a run for now. We’ve all seen the cycles, up and down. I’m glad I converted most of my dead cash into PMs. Most of my silver buy in was around $9 to $23 an ounce. Gold was $1,950ish.
At some point there will be little foreign demand for fag USDs. There’ll be even less for our sub-par military who places its best resources for Isn’treal.
And of course, we can’t eat and drink metals and ammo. Keep plenty of food on the shelves. When the ride starts it will no doubt be bumpy.
If people were paying attention greenbacks would already be useless for anything other than toilet paper.
How much is Afghanistan and Iraq? The ol’ war is good for the economy only works in WWII when we had all the manufacturing.
Fiat currency requires income tax to sustain its value. By forcing you (at gunpoint) to pay taxes in the currency they issue, they create demand for the currency. The value of which otherwise might suffer from lack of demand. You could choose to transact in some other currency. But now, through taxation, they’ve forced you to go out and get some of their currency. See how that works?
You wrote this about 48 hours ago and the debt is almost 200 billion higher as of my post and thats this mornings news report numbers. Tell me how I shouldnt be black pilled when every single institution and artifact of society, people, gov at all levels keeps declining at a rate faster than a B-52 going down over Hanoi. I cant circle the square anymore, and people just get dumber and more self absorbed by the day. So shall i, me and my lawn and my grille are gonna be fast friends.
It keeps doubling every 8 years. Eventually? Infinity.
But in 2034 it will be $80 trillion.
Anyone think that will work out okay/