Nothing clears a room more quickly than a column on fiscal crisis, but in Whitesnake’s eternal words, here I go once more.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Wall Street is” singing the alarm” about Washington’s debt and saving vices, and that “it’s worth listening this moment.”
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Spoiler: Hearing was often worthwhile.
Hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, the author of” How Countries Go Broke,” claimed that the United States must” three years, give or take a year” to control its spending or suffer a “heart attack.” For extremely dangerous U.S. loan, bond markets may require higher and higher interest rates.
Carol Roth issued a warning about a “double nova” on X monday. We are on the verge of a new global financial system, and we are also on the verge of a potential software upheaval caused by AI, which could lead to significant job losses, at least in the short to medium term.
One of those, according to Roth, is a once-in-a-lifetime surprise, and neither of them is unfathomable.
Yet a relative bill collector like Peter Orszag, the former spendthrift budget director of President Barack Obama, is concerned. He wrote last week that” Those who bemoaned the inadequate of deficit spending and bill rates” during the Obama management” seemed to weep wolf.” However, he today warns that the dog is “lurking significantly closer to our door.”
Look, you have a problem if God forbid sends you to a doctor with a lot of medical bills. But that’s a one-time event, God ready. It might take years of scrimping and saving to pay off that physician debt, but it can be accomplished.
Let’s say rather that you’ve been using your ex-wife’s brand-new Lexus on the Amex every year as part of the marriage arrangement and are back down on a McMansion you can’t effectively locate in a business where you didn’t buy.
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You are flying at Ludicrous Speed without an off-ramp, not only because you are in arrears.
That’s generally where Washington is best now, but it’s getting much, much worse. When his residence of cards suddenly collapses, the idiot with the McMansion and the father he can’t manage didn’t take the entire town down with him. That jerks his record score. We might ruin the globe.
President Donald Trump’s hope appeared to be that a combination of DOGE-inspired tariff increases, higher-wage jobs, and restoring higher-wage jobs would provide the nation some breathing room to negotiate the bond markets and lower those trillion-dollar monthly interest payments by a peg or two.  ,
Here’s where things went wrong.
Elon Musk’s promises to find a trillion dollars in monthly savings has never been realized, and Congress is too cowardly to pass any pocketbook he and his crazy children found. Even though the money largely goes to interests and groups diametrically opposed to conservatism, the so-called Republican Congress lacks the courage to undo the enormous fiscal damage done by Joe Biden’s massive spending spree.
Let’s move on to the next item, entitlements, because DOGE is DOA and I have nothing but f-bombs for the Republican Congress.
The biggest contributors to spending and debt are Medicare and Medicaid, respectively. No one will ultimately receive what they paid for.
Nobody.
Charlie, I’m sorry, but everyone needs to get a haircut. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville put it almost 200 years ago,” American democracy will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the money of the people.” It erupted more slowly than he had anticipated, primarily as a result of Adam Smith’s observation that” a country has a great deal of ruin.”
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Don’t you hate it when a Frenchman is right about us, though?
Former Clinton hand James Carville remarked in 1993, when jittery bond traders placed the kibosh on Clinton’s most ambitious ( i .e., reckless ) spending plans, that” I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President, the Pope, or as a 400 baseball hitter.” ” But I want to return as the bond market,” she said. You can intimidate anyone.
There is no intimidating a Congress that is determined to win the next election with the money of the voters, as John McClane would put it.  ,
So, if there are any readers left here at the end of this depressing column, I’m just happy not to have to cross that uncharted road once more.
I Have Seen the Future of the Air Force, and It Is Good, is a recommendation.
