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Mulvaney: Congress must break its bipartisan addiction to spending

16 1
15.05.2024

By the time you read this, the U.S. federal debt will have passed $35,000,000,000,000. (Call it $35 trillion if you like; I prefer thirty-five thousand billion). Last week, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports showing how both programs are barreling toward insolvency.

And in its May financial statement, the U.S. Treasury announced that interest payments in the first seven months of the fiscal year exceeded each of defense spending, Medicare and Medicaid.

It has been, by any measure, a rough couple of weeks for anyone who cares about fiscal sanity.

But aside from a handful of fiscally conservative groups (yes, a couple of those still soldier on), nobody seemed to care. Certainly, there was the occasional member of Congress who tweeted out something. But even the leading financial media outlets quickly moved on to what they must have considered bigger stories of the day.

After all, Stormy Daniels was testifying.

It’s actually easy to explain why so few people care about the current fiscal situation. It isn’t because the issues are really that difficult to understand. Most people deal with debt in their own lives. They have good debt (mortgages), bad debt (credit cards) and debt that is something in between (car loans). But........

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