US is spending record amounts servicing its national debt – interest rate hikes add billions to the cost

  Consumers and businesses aren’t the only ones feeling the pain of higher borrowing costs because of Federal Reserve rate hikes. Uncle Sam is too.

  The U.S. government spent a record US$213 billion on interest payments on its debt in the fourth quarter, up $63 billion from a year earlier. Indeed, a jump of almost $30 billion on the previous quarter represents the biggest quarterly jump on record. That comes as the Fed lifted interest rates a whopping 4.25 percentage points from March through December.

Abolish foreign aid, all of it

  As most everyone knows, the federal government is now in debt to the tune of more than $22 trillion. Since federal officials are now spending, on an annual basis, around a trillion dollars more than what they are bringing in with taxes, that is going to raise the federal debt by a trillion dollars every year. We are reminded of this phenomenon by the periodic debate on whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, an implicit acknowledgment that too much federal debt is not a good thing, especially since the feds will ultimately tax the American people to pay back what they have borrowed to fund their welfare-warfare state.

  On the welfare-state side, the big-ticket items are Social Security and Medicare, the two crown jewels of the American welfare state. Abolishing them would go a long way toward resolving the fiscal problem.

Hurtling toward bankruptcy

  The federal government owes people almost $22 trillion. That means that American taxpayers owe people almost $22 trillion. That’s because the federal government has no money of its own. The money it gets comes entirely from American taxpayers. That’s what the IRS is for — to make certain that everyone sends his or her required amount of taxes to the federal government to enable it to cover its expenditures.

  According to usdebtclock.org (which is an Internet spectacle worth looking at), federal tax revenue amounts to around $3.3 trillion. The amount of federal expenditures is over $4.1 trillion. That means that almost another trillion dollars will be added to the government’s debt load, making it $23 trillion.

Richard M. Ebeling: Debt ceiling hysteria and profligate government

  Once again, the financial fears have been ratcheted up due to recent announcements by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that by the middle of March 2018 the federal government will have run out of room to continue borrowing due to the official debt ceiling. Some are now calling for scrapping a legal debt ceiling altogether, and to allow Uncle Sam to have an unlimited line of credit. This is a bad idea.

  Back in September 2017, Congress and the President agreed to temporarily suspend the Federal debt ceiling until December 8, 2017. Whatever might be the cumulative outstanding debt at that time would become the new legal ceiling, unless Congress voted to raise it, which did not happen. So when December 8 rolled around, the total federal debt, due to continuing government borrowing in the last months of 2017, came to around $20.5 trillion.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Foreign interventionism is destroying us

  Most everyone acknowledges that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, possessed deep insights into the relationship between liberty and government. One of his important insights involved the relationship between liberty and war:

David B. Muhlhausen: Bring back PART: The case for evidence-based fiscal discipline

  Though tax revenues are at all-time highs, Washington continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than it collects every year. As a result, the federal government now carries an enormous amount of debt: more than $19.5 trillion. It now owes more than our nation produces (i.e., debt far exceeds Gross National Product).

  Clearly, Washington needs to reel in its out-of-control spending. To do that, policymakers should fund only those programs that actually work and defund programs that don’t.

Richard M. Ebeling: The entitlement state and America’s fiscal crisis

  The Republican and Democrat Party Conventions are now behind us, but through all the cheers and jeers, hoopla and poopla, warnings of a dark and dangerous future or promises of a bright and beautiful shape-of-things-to-come, one of the most serious shadows hanging over America was hardly mentioned at all: the unsustainability of the “entitlement” programs of the welfare state.

  In fact, Clinton and the Democrats have proposed to both maintain and expand the redistributive state, and Trump has expressed his intention of not challenging Social Security or Medicare.

Katherine Green Robertson: The debt bomb and other election year problems

  "If you want to tackle a tough issue, wait until after the election."

  This is one of the most understood ‘rules’ in politics. Unfortunately, elections never stop and oftentimes, the "tough issues" just get set aside in hopes that the problem will go away—at least until after the next election.

Joseph O. Patton: Martha Roby bakes a cake

  I have never expected much from Alabama’s Congressional delegation – no soaring oratory, no landmark legislation. I just assume they’ll trumpet the usual talking points about Jesus and guns, gay folks and Muslims, and to a lesser extent poor folks and anyone whose skin color dares to differ from their own. And of course women, especially single women, whose uteruses have become quite popular with today’s Republican Party.

  I’m not too shaken when one of them utters something painfully embarrassing which casts the entire state in a bad light… As a native of the Deep South I’m not flabbergasted by ignorant utterances or people speaking in racist tongues even as they cower behind a Bible. It’s as common as kudzu and adultery facilitated by the bed of a pickup truck.

Ian M. MacIsaac: Freeze, this is a stickup: hostage negotiations in the fiscal cliff crisis

  "We're nowhere."

  That was House Speaker John Boehner's summation of the fiscal cliff negotiations as of this time last week, in an interview on Fox News Sunday.

  Boehner said that plan proposed by President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to avoid the fiscal cliff, which included an end to Congress's control of the debt ceiling limit along with $1.6 trillion in new revenue, was "a non-serious proposal;" particularly because, as Boehner portrayed it, the proposal contained federal spending that outweighed its proposed budget cuts.