The Best of Reason: Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?

Both parties—and the voters—are to blame for the national debt fiasco.

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The Best of Reason: Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?

This week's featured article is "Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?" by Brian Riedl.

This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses

Comments

[Eeyore]

Delusions of exceptionalism?

[Gaear Grimsrud]

The best huh.

[JesseAz (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

A good portion of their articles are ignoring costs of illegal immigrants or complaining about hoe hard FAFSA is to apply to. So interesting best of.

[Gaear Grimsrud]

But what does this have to do with JD Vance? I thought this was Vance day at Reason.

[It's only a paper moon, Nominalists]

There are 3 levels in the explanation
1) Most Americans don't get the needed Economics schooling they should get so it is like asking most Americans to solve an algebra problem

2) The indoctrinated-educated will buy MMT and Bernie Sanders as the explanation for why it is okay to not care

3) There is the common-sense school of (how many?) Americans , who say that this is not how it works with the family budget or the place they work at, so they think it is crazy policy.

The election will probably decide things. But it will depend on information about how wasteful things are now. I saw Yellen's call for $3 Trillino a year for climate change and thought : But that is pure waste because China and India are blatantly INCREASING coal

INDIA (on Bloomberg)
India’s Plans to Double Coal Production Ignore Climate Threat
The south Asian giant is setting new targets to use more coal

CHINA (on South China Morning Post)
China doubles down on coal with rapid roll-out of new railway track to the world’s largest deposit
257km line from Zhundong open pit to Urumqi will increase the mine’s transport capacity to more than 100 million tonnes a year

SO just pure waste, that is the real scandal. Billions thrown away while India and China do their own thing

[Peter Kreeft taught me LOGIC, BEWARE !!!!!!!]

It was MMT introduced the Bernie Sanders and taken up by lazy dumb unthinking clods like Biden.
Biden was/is an academic dullard (bottom 10 of his Syracuse law class) > to have such dumb man and stupid VP run a country indicts every fool that voted for them. She blew about $1.5 Billion and was saying
"The Harris campaign rolled out proposals Monday aimed at garnering support from Black men, including on the economy, which include providing fully forgivable $20,000 loans to Black entrepreneurs to start businesses,"
So most business folks know exactly how that must go wrong. Set up a Black for your worthless business , get the $20 000 loan, use it for whatever you want and move on.
If the front business fails --- MORE money will be allocated in the future.

I saw a similar thing under Obama's school program. Kids sign up for school, never go to classes,and use the money for rent.