RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4389558-joe-bidens-extremist-spending-is-a-danger-to-the-us/

Joe Biden says “Extreme Maga Republicans” want to wreck the economy by cutting federal spending. And yet, it is his administration’s blowout budgets that are extreme. Never in this country’s history, with the exception of two emergencies — World War II and COVID — have we spent taxpayer money so recklessly. 

Consider: in just the past three months, the federal debt of the United States jumped by $1 trillion. The U.S. now owes $34 trillion, up from $33 trillion at the end of September. For reference, it took 198 years of borrowing for the government to rack up its first trillion dollars of debt; that milestone was first reached in 1981.   

Putting that gargantuan figure in context, debt held by the public in 1981 amounted to about 25 percent of GDP; today’s debt amounts to more than 100 percent of GDP. Our debt is bigger than the entire economy of every single country in the world but the U.S. and China. 

The Peterson Foundation further puts our debt in perspective, noting that “$34 trillion is enough to cover a public four-year degree for every graduating high-school student for 106 years.”  

This should worry everyone. There’s a reason that Fitch Ratings downgraded United States’ credit rating from “AAA” to “AA+” last year, several years after S&P made the same decision. The last ratings agency still awarding U.S. debt its platinum rating is Moody’s; last year they lowered the outlook to “negative” from “stable,” citing a drop in “debt affordability.”    

https://www.racket.news/p/note-from-the-campaign-trail

SIOUX CITY, IA — I’ve done this gig so many times I have Pavlovian reactions to certain airports, but having never flown here, I didn’t know Sioux City’s three-letter code is SUX. That’s the name of the car that raged-out ex-councilman Ron Miller demands when he takes the Detroit mayor hostage in Robocop. “I want something with reclining leather seats that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage,” he shouts, Uzi in hand.

“How about a 6000 SUX?” a police captain bullhorns back. Miller likes it, but wants cruise control. “I want a recount!” he yells, stepping over bodies. “And no matter how it turns out, I want my old job back!” So the story connects. Who’d have thought?

Anyway, Sioux City’s cool, just never came this way.

I started covering presidential campaigns in 2004. The problem then was the events were fake. Candidate speeches were market-tested piles of words designed to attract the statistical middle of the middle. In post-event asides, aides pretended to socialize and fed you rehearsed spiels over beers about their candidate’s path to victory. Everything was canned. A memory that stands out is plastic clumps of grass scotch-taped to reporters’ seats on Howard Dean’s “grassroots express” charter. It was hard to divine much, traveling in that mechanized sales hell.

Now things are reversed. Reality is altered before you leave the house. Challengers are censored or deamplified, the incumbent “brushes off” debates, vote counts are shady (what’s with Iowa Democrats waiting until Super Tuesday to announce caucus results?), and even ballots are curated. Coverage of everyone but the President and whoever’s currently pushed as the “viable” Republican alternative to you-know-who (“Could Haley Beat Trump? Big Donors are Daring to Dream,” writes the New York Times) is a desert of lies and hit jobs. Even public reaction is edited. A controversial guest essay by lefty legal scholar Samuel Moyn in the Times arguing the Supreme Court should vote 9-0 to return Trump to the Colorado ballot appears devoid of approving comments. I could buy most disapproving, but it looks more like all. Who can tell, without checking for yourself, where public sentiment is now?