"We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on. This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted to prevent.
1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.
2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.
I read about a guy in Turkmenistan who would as a punishment be taxed 20%, and I thought, living in Western Europe or North America is kind of a financial punishment .
If you need more money, you can get another job or get a better paying job. You might even take out a loan to start a small business. Raising your income is an alternative to cutting expenses. And taking on debt is actually a useful way to get the benefits of a purchase without having to save up for it first.
>you can get another job or get a better paying job
For an increasing number of people over an increasing period of time, this isn't an option? Do you think people can snap their fingers and materialize a 6-figure tech salary? I just saw two layed off people on linkedin today, that's two more 5+ years experienced professional software devs on the market...
How much tax is enough? The government would, without playing a deduction game, would love to take 20-30% of my income, while having devalued my dollar by 50-100% in the last 5 years. My salary goes half as far.
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
It's telling that you didn't even consider that the taxes would come from businesses. The businesses that created the majority of inflation by gouging consumers out and bleeding them dry every tiniest opportunity they legally could.
I mean practically this take is so wrong. If the (US) government is just so hell bent on taxation how the heck did we get to the point where taxes on income went from 90% (~1950) on top bracket to less than 35%? Business tax was (35% 2008) -> 20% (2020).
Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.
Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money.
All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.
Right but until Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Executive Branch has an empty wallet and maxed out credit card. Funding doesn’t go out all at once either. Some programs don’t start until later in the year for example. They typically aim to distribute 1/12th of the yearly allowance per month. Sometimes agencies will over spend early and have to be austere later (like FEMA last year).
Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.
Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.
The debt ceiling is entirely artificial, and ought to be unconstitutional. Congress decides how much to spend. Issuing debt when necessary to pay for those allocations is implied.
Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.
The military is over half of all Fed discretionary spending.
Another huge expense is servicing our debt.
Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.
By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment
One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.
Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)
Musk is stealing data to use for his own gain, and installing back doors so he permanently has control over government. It will take decades to undo the spyware he's installing.
These are the biggest contributors to undoing Clinton's balanced budget in the 90's:
* Bush Jr Tax Cuts
* Useless Iraq war
* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks
* Trumps tax cuts
* COVID spending
When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.
Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.
The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
It’s quite debatable what the founders intended here. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.
>cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession
This is not correct.
The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.
The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.
That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
> The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
Your conclusion directly contradicts the Code you quoted.
From the Code:
>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...
The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".
However, your conclusion adds:
>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.
The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".
This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.
I actually think that they would still care. It weirdly feels cathartic to know that we are no longer spending federal taxpayer dollars on “zombie apocalypse preparation classes” no matter how insignificant it is to the budget. What is the best way to eat an elephant?
Agree .. but my point is that people will still care, on principle. Throw in any kind of cut, or esp. a helicopter payment, and the effect would be shock and awe
The Impoundment Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the house and unanimous support in the senate. It was a direct rebuke to Nixon deciding he had the presidential authority to not fund programs he didn't like.
It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.
The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.
It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.
As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
> it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."
Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
Forget the Impoundment Act -- this is a Constitutional issue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the President is required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which budget authority is provided by the United States Congress. Shuttering USAID, as Trump and Musk have done, goes way beyond mere line item impoundments.
However, they claim that USAID was spending far too much on projects that were not in line with their objectives. Not even Congress can create an agency that is fully autonomous with zero oversight from anyone within the government.
Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.
That's just one example. Hamas has been receiving funding for years, despite their less than decent track record of using the money for it's intended purpose.
Yeah this was totally debunked, I believe the programs that were said to be "going to terrorists" were actually promoting women's literacy in Afghanistan.
All of these agencies had multiple levels of oversight both within the executive and through congress. Trump eliminated inspectors general positions providing oversight.
The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.
> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.
The current SCOTUS majority isn't afraid to overturn 50 year old precedents. Given they overturned Roe v Wade, why not Train v City of New York too?
But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.
"Can't" here is not a statement of fact. First off, the US government can and is paying the interest on the debt.
Second, the debt is denominated in US dollars. If congress were to authorize it, the US government could print money and pay off one hundred percent of the debt in a single day. This would have negative side effects, but it's clear that "can't" is not the correct term.
So saying that too much is being spent is indeed a qualitative assessment, not a fact.
Taking out a loan is okay, in the short term, if you have a plan to pay back your loan using income that you plan to obtain in the future but do not have available right now. THe US national debt has grown so large that the interest payments alone are like 20% of the federal budget, and that doesn't even touch the principal. It has reached pyramid scheme levels of borrowing, and no pyrmaid scheme can last forever. One day, lenders will lose confidence in their ability to get their money back and everything will collpase all at once.
In order to prevent that, the budget must be cut. People must be fired. Promising projects must be discontinued. The question is where to make the cuts and how, because cuts in the wrong places in the wrong way will end up making the problem worse. For me, working in healthcare/science/research, I see the cuts to the NIH spending as a bad cut, because it sacrifices a lot of future revenue from scientific R&D. Same with cutting USAID and losing a ton of soft power that could be used to persuade developing countries to let in American companies. Or firing, say, IRS employees, since they're the ones who actually bring in the revenue. So there are good cuts and there are bad cuts, but the point is that eventually cuts must be made.
Well, I must admit that is true, but I guess that 20% of the annual budget going toward interest feels likean impossibly large fraction to overcome. But yes, theoretically, if GDP grew by 300% in the next year, the debt would shrink proportionately, and I would feel much better about not needing to make any cuts. I suppose my concern is that with the nature of the business cycle, we will run into a recession sooner or later, and when that happens, if GDP and tax revenues both go down for a sustained period, then I would worry that lenders would become hesitant to provide additional funding. But I suppose that would be a complicated situation with many other factors, so maybe I am worrying too much.
The debt is being paid off when it’s due, every time, as it always has been. If we want to lower the total debt, cutting spending is not the only option. Money that the government spends increases economic activity and in some cases more than pays for itself in returned revenue. Raising taxes that have been lowered or eliminated since the last time we had a surplus (at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency) is step one in getting things under control.
The government's debt is not the same type of thing as household debt. Can you elaborate on how you think they are the same? Do you believe there are not other factors besides just credits being less than debits?
This is a strategy to protect against currency devaluation, but you still need to worry about interest rate risk (as do companies in the public markets, so investing in stocks isn't a sure thing).
Unfortunately, for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, there's not much to be done besides wait for wages to catch up. And in general, wages don't keep immediate pace with inflation. The net result is that lower-income workers suffer the bulk of the consequences of high inflation.
Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we don't have enough to spend.
Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.
