So, like a voluntary tax to pay billionaire bill.
I’ll get right on that, just need to tip my landlord first
I think tax evasion is morally permissible because this 'country' is a bloodthirsty pile of grifters that spends nearly a trillion annually on defense, and you're asking me to voluntarily pay down the deficit that has largely been ran up because of said bloated defense spending?
lmao
Its morally permissible, but if caught you will end up paying more in fees/penalties and maybe jail
Crash crash crash crash
Reminder: the national debt is only worrisome if the nation’s credit rating is downgraded. Rational brain says this is just a publicity stunt since no gofundme has ever even approached a billion dollars let alone trillions of dollars (the working class just doesn’t have that kind of spending money). Conspiracy brain says Trump’s gonna fire the Fed chair and crash the world economy. He was talking about it a few days ago iirc.
National debt is also important because higher interest payments reduce the operational budget for the government. That directly translates into cuts in public services.
They choose to cut the operational budget. Also the solution to lower interest payments is to set the interest rate to zero, something the Congress can easily do since Fed itself was created by the Congress.
Btw interest on reserves which is also a liablitity of the Gov (fed, not treasury) is never mentioned. Interest on Treasuries is only ever mentioned because it's a line item on the Gov budget.
Of course it's all a choice. The whole economic system is a choice. I'm just pointing out what ends up happening in practical terms.
yea my point was that the amount of sovereign debt to GDP doesn't really matter. In the 1990s during the time when Clinton was destroying welfare and trying a budget surplus, the amount of sov debt to GDP was much lower than it is currently, yet they did austerity anyways, it was more ideology than any arbitrary ratio. And even if the Government ran so much surpluses (say, due to external surplus which will not happen with the U.S.), the capitalists will still demand their risk free assets, since 2008 that has been interest on reserves, but reserves and treasuries are equally risk free (longer term ones have interest rate risk but if you hold till maturity you will get paid).
what i'm saying applies to all countries with their own currencies, not just the U.S. U.S however has a special privilege of the rest of the world 'wanting' to accumulate Dollars. However, most first world currencies are extremely privileged w.r.t. rest of the world wanting to accumulate them, i.e. high on the 'currency hierarchy'. this isn't just about the exchange rate movements but the structural power that comes from geopolitical situation. Among third world countries, larger ones have more privilege e.g Indian Rupee, Indonesian Rupiah, Brazilian Real etc while say, Mozambican metical would be much lower in the hierarchy.
oh yeah very much agree with all that
Not for the US actually.
How so? The way the system currently works in practice is that the government cuts productive spending in favor of paying interests.
Because the dollar is the global reserve currency and the government creates this currency arbitrarily and in any quantity it desires the US does not need to collect revenue in order to spend money. You're thinking of this as a household budget where you save a bit on the food budget to pay off your student loans, but the money comes into existence by the US spending it, and when the US collects it as tax the money functionally disappear. The purpose of taxation for the US is limiting the money supply, and that is why it's deflationary because the whole world has a demand for dollars.
No I'm not thinking about a household budget here, and I understand how fiat currencies, and the global reserve work. What I'm explaining to you is that what actually happens within the system is that the government will use this as an excuse to do austerity. You're describing how a fiat currency could work under a different financial system as opposed to the capitalist system that's actually in place in the US.
No. You seemingly dont understand how fiat system works because instead of talking about money supply and money demand you are acting as if the US has a finite amount of dollars and it needs to collect revenue to service debt and might have to cut services to service said debt. What you are saying is wrong. You are not "explaining" things, you are wrong on a fundamental level.
Nowhere am I saying anything of the sort. Perhaps try reading what I actually wrote and then address that?
Ok then what are you saying. Because you are disgreeing with fairly basic explanation of monetary politics, I.e. supply and demand of money, and countering with something about the US having to spend less because they have too much debt to service.
What part of what I wrote is unclear to you?
37 trillion / 350 million = 105 714.286
lol
Apparently the top 400 Billionaires hold 5.4trillion. so we can get that under 90k per.
The rest of the billionaires and multimillionaires will chip in a large portion of that as well I assume.
This seems like a good plan to me.
it doesn't do anything, you are destroying your money for no one's benefit except to make a number that doesn't matter go down slightly (the debt itself won't go down since the Gov runs a deficit, just that it won't go up as much). at least with typical grifts the money goes from MAGA supporter's bank to Trump's bank, in this case, it's being deleted.
Myrtle, empty the life savings, president trump needs our help!
Yes dear.
LMAO this is so fucking pathetic
it's giving "I said the n-word in public and I'm being oppressed! Here's my GiveSendGo", but instead of a smol bean conservative it's for the biggest fucking economy on planet earth
The world is insane.
They’re feeding the elites and now they literally saying that we’re not gonna pay this you’re gonna pay it.
i don't get it... the US practically has an infinite money glitch they can invoke at any time.. how would this help them in any way? what an unserious bunch.
People have been able to “donate” their money to the treasury for years, this is just an update to the payment methods. Complete non-story.
They should open a go fund me page, bring America full circle
Here's an idea: what if we had the government pay for everyone's healthcare and then whenever someone wanted to build an F-35 or whatever they had to make a GoFundMe for it?
And we'll take 3% for you to piss your money away too!
Bit idea: pressure Musk to put a bilion dollars in the piss pit
oh thank god, i've been asking my representatives in congress for years, "how do i directly send what hasn't been taxed already from my paycheck, to help pay down our debt faster?" and they always had no answer. Persistence really paid off!
I sent you .69 cents
Lotta money in dis shit
High speed internet access
Oh yeah 😏
I love how the contents of the article are even funnier than the headline
The donation program has existed since 1996, with a total of $67.3 million contributed — an amount that remains negligible compared to the federal debt.
Yeah but the program probably costs nothing to run. It's free money for the government. And I am sure they could run an ad campaign to raise more money. Get a billionaire or 2 to donate some for "their country".
Meanwhile, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio is sounding the alarm
Who the hell is ray dalio and why should we care about this ... lawyer associate??? Why is half the article about this random guy's opinions?
He said the data shows that import duties are expected to generate $2.8 trillion in revenue over 10 years.
But the administration hasn't even settled on what the tariff rates are ...
“Even in Washington DC math, that is a $400 billion surplus,” Bessent said.
It really must be some special kind of Washington math because what nunbers is this guy even adding and subtracting?
In an interview last week with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, Bessent added that the administration had already collected nearly $100 billion in tariff revenue so far this year and is “on track for $300B this year.”
According to this database, us imports from Jan to may were $1.55 trillion. Add an extra $300 billion for June. That's about a 5.5% average tax on imports.
Or well, we can be extra generous and remove June and January. June because data for it is not out so the $100 billion treasury revenue might not be including that, and January because trump wasn't in back then. That's an amount of imports $1.22 trillion, leading to a 8.2% average revenue from tariffs.
So the trump admin isn't even raising upto 10% revenue based on their minimum tariff rate even in the most generous estimation.
Dalio is the guy who predicted 15 of the last two economic collapses.
yes! fuck yessssss!!!! finally!!
news
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --