President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

There are so many things that Yellen can delay or push back to avoid a clean default. The rhetoric is all scare tactics. They won't default, not because of their bullshit, but because they know that if they stiff lenders, their ability to deficit spend is gone forever and they will have to leave the gladhanding business and get real fucking jobs that actually produce something, rather than being in the business of borrowing against the country's credit worthiness and spending those borrowings inefficiently at best (corruptly at worst).

Cumulative revenue in the current fiscal year is close to $2.7 trillion. Net interest on the massive amount of debt they have already run up, has cost about $365 billion (and would be much higher without the Fed monetizing it and enabling them to keep acting recklessly). That amount of interest expense in itself is shocking, but the amount of money they have brought in this year is more than seven times what they need to avoid a default. So the default talk is just meant to scare a gullible public.

If they can't deficit spend, it's about making decisions. Presumably they would never touch social security, medicare and veteran's benefits. That is $1.35 billion. Add in the bloated defense budget as the other thing they fetishize, and it eats $465 billion in cumulative outlays for the fiscal year. That means they have more than half a billion dollars left over to waste on their cronyism without a default happening.