The National Debt at some point on August 21,
Republicans are flocking to decry it, after having participated in causing it.
They didn't cause it on their own, but they sure helped. And Trump has spent money like a drunken sailor.
Part of the reason that Trump spends this way is that Trump drank deeply of Peter Navarro's economic kool aide.
Navarro believes heavily in tariffs and Trump, whose always liked the concept of tariffs, but who appears to no longer understand how they work, liked what Navarro had to say.
Tariffs have always existed as a means of boosting local businesses. What they really are, is a species of sales tax. The concept is to make stuff coming in expensive so that people won't buy it, and will buy something made locally instead. That's about it.
The problem is that when you do that, you have to actually be making the things locally. Tariffs might have made good economic sense if the US had started easing them in during the late 1960s when the post World War Two economy started to fade. But we didn't, as we saw no need to.
By the 2020s, it's really a little bit late. In fact, it's way late. The world's economy is now highly integrated, surpassing the level that had only previously been obtained prior to World War One. We don't have what people complained about, for example, in the late 60s and early 70s of cheap Japanese products taking the market (something that wasn't anywhere near the threat it was imagined to be). What we have instead is an economy where anything serious has parts made all over the globe. Nothing you are using, if has multiple parts, was "made in America". It was made all over.
Given that, what tariffs really do is simply make everything more expensive. It'd take at least a decade for high tariffs to "bring back manufacturing", if it can do that at all.
Whether it can ever bring in jobs is questionable at this point. Since January 2025 the US has in fact lost manufacturing job, with about 75,000 departing . Trump likes to claim that new factories are springin gup all over the place. In fact, a factory construction boom peaked in 2024, under Joe Biden, and has been crashing since.
It may just be that it isn't the late 1890s any more.
So all the Trump administration has really done is ineffectively switched income tax for a national sales tax. It's hurting everyone, and it is largely illegal, resulting in a lot of the money being collected, having to be sent back out.
Congress can fix this, if it has the will. Republicans right now are pretending that they do, but with few exceptions, like Thomas Massie, they're rank cowards and voted for Trump's economic fantasies. It may take a Constitutional Amendment to force the matter, which at a bare minimum should provide that save in the time of war and bona fide emergency, the budget must balance and retire a portion of any built up debt, with taxes to automatically rise to balance any budget that isn't balanced.
What needs to be done first of all is to get the budget under control. That would technically be easy to do. And part of that needs to be a sincere effort to eliminate the debt. It's now completely impossible to do so rapidly, so it'll have to be done slowly.
On expenditures themselves, the Federal budget breaks out this way:
Social Security: 22%
Medicare: 15%
Net Interest (on the national debt): 15%
Health (including Medicaid): 13%
National Defense: 13%
Income Security: 10%
Veterans Benefits and Services: 6%
Social Security is in trouble due to slow down in population growth. Nothing can be done about that or should be. Medicare is in the same boat.
National Defense should be cut by 2/3s. That can be done by eliminating the insane level of weapons expenditures and by going to a reserve based defense. That'd help, but that won't accomplish everything, obvious. Military retirement age should be changed so that thirty years rather than 20 are the qualifying number. That'd help a bit.
Indeed, there are actually a fair number of Federal jobs that require twenty years in order to retire at some level. Save for policing roles and military ones,. Fed retirement should require thirty years and only be capable of being drawn when you reach 60 years of age.
And yes, this is a crisis.
So, you might perhaps note, you are a Distributist. Does this square with Distributism?
Overall it does. At one time I would have considered tariffs a policy option to address foreign manufacturing, but nothing fails like failure and its obvious that isn't the solution to that. Boosting U.S. manufacturing has to come some other way, and frankly technology is probably what would do it. Technological revolutions tend to bring industry to where they occur. Our problem here is that this is entirely in the hands of the super wealthy right now, who don't have your interest or that of the country's in mind.
Additionally, our current President is addled and looks back with romanticism on the past . He's actively working to destroy American industry as a result. Electricity is the future of transportation, not petroleum. Wind, solar and nuclear are the future of power generation, not coal (Trump does support nuclear). We need to really get with the program and we can do that through regulation. Phasing out fossil fuels should be an economic priority for obvious reasons, and an environmental one for obvious reasons, and a defense one for obvious reasons.
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