Mitch Blood Green said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
Realitybites said:
No, I'm saying what you support is not sustainable or rational.
1 United States
Defense spending: 997.0
Percentage of GDP: 3.4
2 China
Defense spending: 314.0
Percentage of GDP: 1.7
3 Russia
Defense spending: 149.0
Percentage of GDP: 7.1
Obviously we need a military. A country that does not have one, will inevitably acquire someone else's. However, as the "arsenal of democracy" we need to stop interfering with the democratic process in other nations and take care of our own house.
"quit interfering...and take care of our own house....." That's the engine of isolationism. In the real world, you engage in the game of geopolitics because it's cheaper to influence events in your favor than it is to let them drift until you have to go to war to fix them.
...and this is inexcusable: United States spends around 65% of the world's intelligence spending. The country spends over $75 billion each year only on its intelligence. Over ten times that of China or Russia, 20x that of MI6.
Defense spending is not on a straight-line upward trajectory that cannot be fiddled with. Entitlements are.
Entitlement drive deficits, not defense spending.
Trump inherited deficits larger than defense spending.
You cannot balance the budget solely by cutting discretionary spending.
You have to either cut entitlements OR grow the economy faster than the deficits.
QED we have a Trump policy to do the latter.
The oceans around us do make us more secure than most countries. But they also create logistical challenges that make it more expensive for us to be ready to fight. We must have lots of logistical infrastructure (bases, cargo aircraft, sea-lift capacities, etc....) . Indeed, we are the primary provider of those kinds of assets to Nato. The Brits barely got a couple of brigades to the Falklands. The French aren't much better. Nobody else in Nato could come close to doing it. There was a time when that reality was perceived as a good thing...that it gave us extra controls over the foreign policy of Nato members . There was a time when we were happy for Nato to be a US skeleton into which Europeans mainly needed to help flesh out into a large Army. Now that we've downsized from Cold War and GWOT, we are asking for Nato countries to do more. And they have pledged to do so (motivated by what Russia did in Ukraine). That gives us some ability to focus more on Asia. (which we are doing).
It is expensive to have a military powerful enough to do what ours can do. But it does provide deterrence. It does drive allies to us. And it does greatly reduce the odds of having to fight wars that would cost multiples of our annual defense budget.
You keep changing to what the budget and reconciliation does, NOT how much it costs. No one is arguing that we have a strong military or the border needs to be shut down and that cost money.
What we are saying is that it is still deficit spending and Trump is not saving us or future generations dollar 1. It is more of the same, actually a very NeoCom/Globalist plan. NeoComs would love the money going to Ukraine, the military and border security. Missile defense? Right out of the Reagan playbook.
But, it is not a financially conservative plan by any means.
By the way, we are working on both the FY 26 budget which is in Congress AND FY 25 reconciliation. Neither of them are showing ANY signs of savings. Even the FY 25 reconciliation, with all the so-called DOGE savings, the final number is going to be higher.
You are blaming discretionary spending, which is only a quarter of the budget, for the deficit. You are saying that slashing discretionary spending, which does save money, is irrelevant unless the budget balances. Which of course means you are prepared to cut entitlement spending, right? If you're not prepared to cut social security and medicare to balance budget, then you have no choice but to grow your way out of the problem = slow the rate of rise in spending, increase the rate of economic growth. Instead, you are just throwing a temper tantrum because Trump didn't do everything at once.
Here's the reality: Federal spending is never in our lifetime going to be lower than a prior year. Our population is growing, and within that our largest generation is moving into entitlement years. Growth in entitlements alone, as a matter of mathematics, guarantees growth in spending. To balance the budget without cutting entitlements, we would have to ELIMINATE all discretionary spending. Not just cut every government agency including the military....but eliminate it. ALL. So we have to grow our of it.
Trump has done much to slow the rate of growth - RIF, close agencies, litigate to close more, recissions packages, etc..... And he's done much to increase revenues - a stimulus plan just passed and will in future years generate more revenue, tariffs are on pace to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue, etc..... And he's doing all that in the face of fierce opposition, judicial activism, media firestorms, etc..... He did not promised to eliminate the deficit in a day. He promised to to shrink deficits and grow the economy. He is making progress on that.
But if it makes you feel better to stomp your feet & scream at the sky that we do not have a balanced budget today, by all means. Please proceed. It's always beneficial when the unserious identify themselves.
There you go again, if you don't agree or question it is stomping your feet. Very Bannon-esqe...
But, you miss the point. Trump and MAGA ran on reducing spending and the deficit. Yet, his budget will add 1.8T to 3.4T. After the same promise in 2016 of paying off the deficit in 8 years (19 trillion at the time), he added 7T.
If Covid hadn't happened, those numbers would look different.
And you have the balls to give me a hard time over questioning whether he will make the economic situation worse? This guy has a track record, this is not 2016. We know exactly what he will do. If government spending and the National Debt are important issues to you, you better be paying attention and not just rubber stamping whatever Bannon tells you to.
It's not really possible to make the situation worse when you have over $20T worth of investments lined up over the next 24 months. Those investments will go directly to GDP.
You can wave your Bannon strawman around all you want. We cannot balance the budget all at once, for a whole bunch of very pragmatic reasons. There will be a glide path to an improved situation. That is exactly the policy Bessent has explained - a return to manageable finances (which is not synonymous with balanced budgets).
You do your argument no favor waiving around the CBO projections.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2025/06/02/routinely_inaccurate_cbo_forecasts_shouldnt_factor_with_tax_writing_1113691.html
We might never see a balanced budget again in our lifetimes. And it's not really necessary to get there (to survive, to keep moving down the road). if you keep annual deficits below the rate of economic growth, you are by definition improving your fiscal situation toward balance - getting better every cycle. Add in inflation and....well, there is a reason we've had decades of deficits. It's the extraordinary sovereign power interventions of the last 25 years that are the concern. We've got to move beyond the globalist model or we cannot escape that cycle. Too many excess dollars chasing too few places to land........
That 20 T isn't going to GDP nor is it coming in. Trump makes the announcement and the governments are disagreeing.
Investment is part of the GDP equation. By definition.
C + I + G + T = GDP,
Where C is consumer spending, I is investment, G is government spending, and T is plus/minus the trade number.
That is elementary textbook Econ 101........
The only question is which years will the investments occur. They most certainly will not all happen at once. Mostly will be in 2026 & 2027.
The model Trump is working looks like this: USA demands (country X) reduce its trade surplus. (X files nails disinterestedly, for decades.) Finally, USA smacks X with a 65% tariff. X jolts upright and squeals. (as it is facing collapse of its export market to USA, with related job losses, hit to GDP/X). Negotiations happen. USA and X agree to a 20% tariff on all imports to USA, 10% tariff on USA exports to X, and X will invest $300b in production operations in the USA.
So what happened there? USA used the threat of tariffs to force X-based companies to move greater percentages of their US-oriented supply chains INSIDE the USA tariff barrier line. Not all of it. Just a portion of it. The capital flows are of course a linear jolt to the US economy (being part of the I variable) but they also create production jobs, create production machinery...INSIDE the USA (increasing tax base, wages, and wartime production capacity). The preferential tariff rate is an offset to X's VAT and other non-tariff subsidies/barriers promoting/protecting the surplus X traditionally ran with the USA.....making US goods somewhat more competitive. All of that serves to abate the trade deficit (strengthening the T variable). Ergo, trade deficit pressure on value of USD abates, and the T number turns from a negative to a positive (providing more upward pressure on GDP.
This is all very elementary macroeconomic stuff. Win/win. We nudge trade back toward balance by forcing investments and getting a preferential tariff rates. X gets a softening T variable in its own GDP equation, but retains access to US markets and sees support for the value of the USD it holds in reserves Best of all, it puts the reflexive neverTrumper critics in position of having to deny that any of it is as real (because if it is real it is going to have significant positive impact.)
Got it?
