We’re right back to George W. Bush’s, “You’re either for us or against us” insanity. From Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman at bonnerprivateresearch.com:
Imbalanced budgets, one-sided coins, empty tanks and ignorance of the past…
(Source: Getty Images)
Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Poitou, France…
Most of all [at times like this], perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
~ C. S. Lewis
The Committee for a Responsible Budget:
Deficit Tops $1.7 Trillion As Interest Rates Surge
After declining in recent years due to the pandemic ending, the deficit is now back on the rise, totaling $1.7 trillion in 2023 and more than double last year’s when you exclude the President’s now-overturned student debt cancellation and timing shifts. At a time when the economy is growing and unemployment remains near historic lows, this should have been a time to reduce deficits in order to help us better prepare to respond to future economic downturns or foreign crises.
There are always convenient justifications for why we should borrow more – it is important, it is an emergency, it will pay for itself, trying to pay for it is just too hard. Those justifications are precisely what got us to this moment where our debt is dangerously high and growing, and economic and national security conditions leave us exceedingly vulnerable. We must change course.
