Federal revenues in November rose $23 billion to $275 billion, a 9% increase from a year earlier.
Outlays jumped $88 billion to $589 billion, 18% higher than a year earlier. Interest payments on U.S. government debt accounted for $25 billion of the increase.
The outlay for interest on the debt in November, at
, surpassed theoutlay for national defense, which was up $8 billion from a year earlier. The outlay for the government-run Medicare health insurance program also rose by $8 billion, to, while the outlay for the government-run Medicaid program for the poor and disabled climbed $2 billion to.
TFW your interest payments approach medicare spending
The weighted average interest rate on the $26 trillion of outstanding Treasury securities rose to 3.10% last month from 2.22% in November of last year.
Seems nice in sense, if fed won’t drop interest rates in the next year, libertarian bugbear about deficits will come closer to fruition
There is nothing wrong with high budget deficit (neoliberal austerity myth needs to die). In fact, it’s the trickling down of the high interest payments that has been keeping the US economy from going into recession over the past 1.5 years.
Remember when all the right wing economists predicted a recession and hard landing? Lol this just shows you how completely out of touch the neoclassical economics is with reality.
The real problem is that the high interest rate is disproportionately enriching the wealthy (the top 1%) while burdening lower classes (who are struck with higher interests for their debt payment). This is how the wealth flows from the bottom 99% to the top 1%.
The US economy is now in a quandary. I have been saying for a long time that as long as the interest rates is high, there will be no recession in the US. BUT, when it starts lowering the interest rates, that’s when recession will come.
Fundamentally its sucking parked money from stock market and overseas into t-bills (why would you buy p/e 25 stock, when treasuries have p/e 20), but for that you need free money. They have not managed to suck stock market money, they’ve managed to suck overseas money though, usa stock market continues to ignore everything and hope for relief.
But free money are not limitless in the world, and the longer this goes the less buyers they will find Like 1 or 2 trillion is fine, 5 trillion a year would be unbearable for the world i think
The US literally doubled the amount of dollars during Covid to keep the economy afloat, and the same during Obama’s years to bail out the failing banks:
Free money is indeed limited to the extent of the availability of labor, resources and technology. The problem is how those money were spent (mostly goes to the rich people instead of investing in public infrastructures and the real sector), not how much they were spent.
Yes, but also willingness of overseas banks to buy t-bills. If usa were not empire, internal market for treasuries is huge but not limitless - on par with total stock market and bond market of round 100 trillion.
If buyers suddenly can’t absorb new treasury bills, for lib economics that’s a huge problem. Yes, fed can accumulate them on their spreadsheet for a while, until people outside of the usa think its fine. Than, if they change their minds it will suddenly be very not fine
Ancaps unironically think that this will be solved by having porky directly replace the government in its entirety and that porky will not just continue this shit.
they’ve managed to suck overseas money
That’s interesting. Capital control now plz.
Money printer go brrr for rich people, who safely park their capital in high-yield Treasury notes before the market collapses.
The point of these high interest rates is to incentivize capitalists to pull out of the real economy, which shrinks jobs, which disciplines labor.
Good thing we’re once again blowing a massive hole in it by getting rid of inheritance taxes.
Billionaires children will become billionaires ant birth and never even have to pay a shatlre of their unearned millions. They’ll just get more money than most people have in a lifetime and then hoard it for their entire lives.
Really hard to take concerns about the deffecit seriously when the people bitching about it also all agree rich people don’t have to pay taxes.
Can’t wait for all the “WOW ECONOMY SO GOOD” wonks to completely ignore this indicator
Supposedly there’s gonna be three cuts to the interest rates in 2024 https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/fed-interest-rate-decision-december-2023.html
its not a problem for now, but paying 1 trillion in debt service and having 1.7 trillion deficit is already problematic.
if there is new oil shock however( 🙏 ), they’ll remain that high, and the average rate will rise further, that would be a deep shit creek.
Sorry this is just neoliberal nonsense. The Federal Reserves creates money out of thin air, it will never not be able to service its debt.
Deficit simply means the money that the government has spent out and hasn’t collected back in taxes yet. Which is good because you want the money to stay in circulation to stimulate the economy. The Clinton administration had a record budget surplus (government taxes more money than they spend, meaning less money in circulation) in the 1990s which then what paved the way towards recession.
The problem with the US is how much of those deficit is spent disproportionately into the rich people’s hands (military industrial complex, interest payments to bondholders etc.) rather than investing into the real sector of the economy.
Fmr. Fed. Chm. Alan Greenspan: The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that.
If we paid off the deficit then there would be no dollars left*, because every dollar was created out of thin air by the government.
*Except for the dollars created by private banks, but those dollars are cancelled 1:1 by the loan debts they were created for.
Why would the government need to tax the money back if the Federal Reserve can create money out of thin air?
I think the answer is to control the amount of inflation. This explains why we saw high inflation after they turned the printer on overdrive. And they can’t just tax half of all money created back so they use other methods like increasing the interest rate. Higher interest rates means more incentive to save and fewer new loans therefore less new money being created.
But I’m no expert so please correct me if I’m wrong
You’re wrong overall but right currently. The reserve can poof magic money into existence because of US dollar hegemony but that’s not guaranteed forever. Other nations couldn’t operate like the US currently does. It’s why modern monetary theory is a joke the second you look internationally. It only operates in a closed, autarkic system
If they’re worried about the deficit they should make the people with all of the money give some of it up.
Instead they’re, once again, changing it so the people with all the money get to keep it and they continue to struggle how to get a bunch of money from people who don’t have any.
The solution is right there if anybody wants to solve it, it’s just their entire lives revolve around not doing that.
