President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Not really. Out of about $26, 27 trillion of national debt and intragovernmental debt, foreigners own about $6 trillion of it. It's not insignificant, but people tend to overstate it, and it's not all concentrated with the Chinese. China is owed a little over a trillion dollars (although they have been on a stealth campaign to reduce that as they probably want a system of SDRs to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency) and Japan is right behind at around a trillion dollars (because Japan has spent decades creating money out of thin air and buying everything not nailed down with it). The Saudis are a small blip.

By contrast, The Social Security Trust Fund and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund is owed somewhere between $2.5 trillion and $3 trillion of our debt.

The Federal Reserve owns about $2.5 trillion of U.S. treasuries (to go along with another $2 trillion of agency securities and mortgage-backed bonds that has distorted the market), which it created money out of thin air to buy, something only they could get away with.

If we default, China takes a hit. But our country (as in everyday Americans) gets hit way worse than any foreigners who are holding those bonds.

 

That isn't true. The tax cuts were irresponsible beyond belief in an environment in which we have been adding more and more wasteful debt every year at the Federal level (and every other government and private level). To put it in perspective, it took the U.S. about 180 years to accumulate $1 trillion in debt (1982). It took ONLY another 27 years or so to get from $1 trillion to $10 trillion (2009). Since then, in 9 years, we have gone from $10 trillion to $21 trillion and it is expanding even more rapidly under this president. To cut what you bring in, when you are out of control with what you are spending = "We don't give a shit and won't give a shit until we have to to deal with a crisis. Who gives a a fuck, because we'll be out of office by then."

But Social Security's ponzi financing was at loggerheads, and it had zero to do with a tax cut this year. As is Medicare's. Even without the tax cuts, with the level of locked-in entitlement spending and the discretionary spending levels we already were at, we were going to just add less to our national debt.