$36 Trillion

There has been a lot of screaming back and forth over what Elon Musk and DOGE has been doing the last month, so I guess I am the one who has to come out and say it. We are broke. Dead broke. The United States government is dead broke. We have a $36 trillion debt. Do you know what $36 trillion looks like? If you spent $1 billion a day, it would take 98 years to spend $36 trillion. For $36 trillion, we could have given every man, woman and child in the United States, over $100,000 each. People on the left will argue that we shouldn’t worry about our national debt because it is equivalent to a family carrying a home mortgage. They are either brainwashed or brainwashing. Our national debt is nothing like a home mortgage. A home mortgage is tied to appreciating asset which could be sold to pay off the entirety of the debt. What can we sell right now to pay back $36 trillion? Absolutely nothing.

Our national debt is equivalent to a family with $100,000 of income carrying $600,000 of credit card debt and only making the minimum payment. It is completely unsustainable. Any financial advisor would recommend filing for bankruptcy. Some politicians are saying that we simply need to balance the budget. That’s a start, but balancing the budget simply means that we are not going to carry a deficit year to year anymore. We still need to pay back $36 trillion of debt. So, the Democrats can continually show the sob stories on social media about federal workers losing their jobs, or about the national parks being understaffed, but we have $36 trillion of debt. We are broke. We have to cut everywhere. The family with $600,000 of credit card bills, not only has to cut out any unnecessary spending, they have to dramatically reduce the necessary spending. Not only will there be no more vacations or manicures or dinners out, they have to start eating peanut butter sandwiches for dinner.

It is absolutely embarrassing how people are screaming bloody murder against what Musk is doing and defending what’s been going on in our government for the last 30 years. Anybody who stands up for the status quo in our government right now, is either corrupt or a coward. These people are equivalent to the spoiled college kid who maxed out his parents’ credit cards and now is calling his parents mean for taking away the credit cards. Trump and Musk would not be doing what they are doing right now, if all the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats had not been ripping off our government for decades. It is not the fault of Donald Trump or Elon Musk if some necessary programs are cut at some point, it is the fault of every corrupt politician who ripped off the American taxpayer.  

It is the fault of an entity like the Clinton Foundation which stole hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid earmarked for Haiti, and now their daughter Chelsea, who has contributed nothing to society, lives in a $10 million house after having a $3 million wedding. It’s the fault of the head of FEMA who diverted tens of millions of dollars of disaster aid for hurricane victims to illegal immigrants so they could live in luxury hotels in New York City. The American taxpayers have been used and abused by corrupt politicians, corrupt special interest groups, and foreign countries for way too long. That is the reason why Trump and Musk are making drastic cuts. The United States government and almost every politician have proven themselves to be poor stewards of the American taxpayers’ money.

You may not like Donald Trump. You may think that he’s obnoxious and petty, but to criticize the President of the United States, whose spending his first 100 days in office, exposing the vast corruption of the federal government, is unprecedented. It should be celebrated. It is in fact courageous. It is something that every politician and every presidential candidate has talked about doing on the campaign trail for years, but when given the chance, no one else has ever done it because it required a level of courage and honesty that they do not possess.

Now his critics are calling Trump a dictator. Dictators enrich themselves and expand the size of government. Trump has lost hundreds of millions of dollars and is shrinking the size of government. He is the exact opposite of a dictator. You know who has enriched themselves and expanded government, pretty much every Democrat in Washington, and most Republicans. Those politicians told you they are doing it for you, but they were doing it for themselves. Every con artist convinces the person they are ripping off that they are doing it for them.

The Republicans in the House just passed a bill ending taxes on tips, taxes on overtime and taxes on Social Security, and the Democrats are apoplectic. They make the same old charge, ‘how are we going to pay for it?’ It is interesting, when the Democrats raise our taxes, they never ask, how is the average citizen going to pay that? They just take our money and let us try to figure how to survive on less. And when the Democrats passed four multi-trillion-dollar spending packages in the first eighteen months of Joe Biden’s presidency, they never asked, ‘how are we going to pay for that?’ They merely slapped the extra spending on the back of the deficit or asked the Fed to print more money.

$36 trillion of debt is generational theft. We go on and on and on in this country about the horrors of slavery, but for our current generation of politicians have run up a debt which is so extreme, that generations of people to come who are not even born yet will be paying back that debt. That is de facto slavery. They will be working for free to pay back our debt that we, not them, benefitted from.

There is no universe in which we would look at where we are fiscally in America and not conclude that we are dead broke. And these corrupt and delusional congress members want to continually spend at the same levels we have been spending. They want to continue to add $1.8 trillion a year to our debt, every single year. And we all know why they’re doing it. They want to collapse the United States government so an authoritarian regime led by them can take over and dictate the entire country. They’re completely corrupt and irresponsible. Out of control spending will be the impetus they will use to take complete control over the government. That is why they are fighting so hard against the cuts that Elon Musk is recommending to Donald Trump because it completely destroys their plans for taking over our lives.

Our debt more than anything else is the reason why I’m against giving any more money to Ukraine to fight that war against Russia. If we were in a surplus, where we had extra money lying around, I’d be all for supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia. But we are dead ass broke. This is what the Democrats have to realize next time there’s proposing giving $50 million to promote transgender pottery in Peru or $100 million to promote DEI in the Congo. You have to make decisions. You have to make financial decisions. If you want to run a $1.8 trillion deficit every year, you’re not going to be able to cut $50 billion checks to Ukraine to fight Russia. It doesn’t work that way.

If we are in peace time, there should be no reason why we run deficits. None. If we’re in a war, or dealing with the worldwide pandemic, those are the years to run deficits. And then when the pandemic is over or we’re living in peace time again, we pay back the debt. That’s the way responsible countries operate. Our politicians treat taxpayer dollars like it’s monopoly money, and the rest of the world treats America like we’re their own personal ATM machine. And then we wonder why we’re $36 trillion in debt. All these people who were crying very loudly because Elon Musk is recommending spending cuts, do not get it. They should be nowhere near making a financial decision for the United States of America. They have absolutely no clue what finances are. Anybody can be Santa Claus when you have a blank check and you can spend as much money as you want. Santa Claus does not exist; we must live in the real world. 

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.