From The Ramparts

Making Sense of Current Events

                                                       Making Sense of Current Events Part 1

                                                                    Junious Ricardo Stanton

            Since Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the forty-seventh president of the United States things have been moving at a hectic whirlwind pace. Unfortunately, the legacy and alternative media have kept the hype going. Trump sells. But are we being given all the facts and are we being told the truth?

 If the long-established pattern of media mendacity holds true the answer is no. The media goes for sensationalism, obfuscation and out and out deceit. We have to use our own powers of discernment and trusted media outlets to figure out exactly what is going on in the world. So my fellow truth seekers and those of you with a thirst for knowledge I will offer some unique perspectives on current events.

            Everyone is talking about Elon Musk and DOGE aka the Department of Government Efficiency. Well first off DOGE is not a real department because only the US Congress can establish a governmental department because they are the ones who have to appropriate the funds to create and sustain it. DOGE was never authorized by the US Congress, period! More correctly it is an advisory group similar to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Elon Musk is not a secretary; he is not even a cabinet members as we saw the other day at Trump’s first public cabinet meeting. He was not seated at the long table and he was there merely to provide and update on what he was doing.

            During the election campaign, Trump promised to cut government spending, waste, fraud and mismanagement. As we have seen from the early DOGE reports, there is a humongous amount of all of that especially waste, fraud and corruption!         The US government like many businesses, corporations and households is floundering in debt. This debt is unsustainable as we heard in the sound bite from Elon Musk at the cabinet meeting. This debt is onerous and will be the downfall of this nation.

Here's an alarming fact, as of September 30, 2024 the US debt to GDP ratio was123%. The US debt was $35.46 trillion with a “T” versus $28.83 trillion in produced goods and services. This cannot go on forever and it won’t. There is a great reckoning coming and unfortunately Trump’s efforts are too little too late to stave off an economic catastrophe. The debt service alone, meaning the interest the government (us taxpayers) pay on the interest of this debt is, as of September 30, 2024, $1,126.5 billion, an increase of $251.0 billion from FY 2023. So you can see just how perilous this situation is from a fiscal well-being vantage. To put it into perspective, according to data from the government, the federal government spent more on interest payments than on national defense or Medicare in FY 2024, and interest costs are expected to continue rising over the next decade!

Trump’s policies will not, I repeat, will not alter this trajectory and slide. He may mean well but the fact is cutting taxes without concomitant massive slashing of spending is not going to change this picture. The cuts Musk is recommending, (this is all he can do recommend because DOGE doesn’t have the authority to fire people or eliminate departments, only the president and Congress can do that) will not save that much money. Remember the government is in trillions of dollars in debt. To give you a concise picture of what this means; one trillion is equal to one thousand billion and a billion is equal to one thousand million! Cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the budget is a start but it will never reduce deficits or get the US out of  the trillions of dollars of debt it is in!

Worst case scenario the US would default on its debt reducing it to pauper status.  Anyone who tells you tax cuts and tariffs are going to defuse the ticking debt time bomb is lying to you. Because its an empire fiscal bankruptcy and collapse would be devastating for the US. They talk about full faith and trust in the government but if the government is literally and figuratively bankrupt, how many other nations are going to trust it?!

Tariffs and leases used to be the nation’s main source of revenue, but then in 1913 the federal income tax was foisted on the public as a way to pay off the banksters who pressed the Congress critters to pass the legislation. Some say the amendment that created the Federal Reserve Bank (which is not part of the government but a cartel of privately owned banks) was illegitimate because the vote was taken while most of Congress was on a holiday break!

 Tariffs not only raise money they are a form of protection; they force other nations to pay a cost to export their goods to the US. In the old days this helped protect US producers by limiting foreign competition since everyone wasn’t willing to pay steep tariffs on their goods. But the problem now is with globalization multi-national corporations who operate in the US who manufacture all or parts of their products overseas, will be forced to pay the tariffs too thus driving up the costs us their products also. Another factor is GDP means goods and services but the US is mainly a service economy now, other nations don’t export services. Think about that for a moment.

The tariffs will drastically increase the cost of living which is already beginning to overwhelm many of us. The Fed’s policies of printing and putting more dollars in circulation and lowering interest rates actually incentivizes more borrowing and debt while simultaneously shrinking the value of the dollar and with additional costs due to tariffs, inflation will continue to skyrocket. Even Trump has been forced to admit he can’t keep prices from rising. The sad reality is his policies will make things worse! Making sense of current events.

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 5:45 AM