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Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
If there are 1.3 million on active duty this is a 2.3 billion pay out.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
I'm convinced that Trump's economic advisors are telling him that the U.S. economy is about to crash and Trump has a combination of unwillingness and incompetence to explain his fiscal policy to the American people.
Offshoring? Tariffs. Slow job growth / rising unemployment? Tax breaks. Underperforming holiday season? Tax credits.
He's hoping he can prolong the status quo long enough for the GOP to do well in the mid-terms without acknowledging the elephant in the room.
I sense patriotic 1776 deals being created atm at used car lots outside of front gates across the land...
A small cost (of other peoples money) to try and buy a meager gain in approval.
Im sure the sea lawyers will come out of the woodworking to provide some commentary, but all I can think is "how in the world is this legal?"
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
The government cannot legally keep surpluses.
The social security administration got around this (up to 2020-ish) by purchasing U.S. treasuries with its surplus (i.e., 'intra-governmental debt,' the only thing keeping social security solvent right now).
If tariffs result in a net positive in whatever financial bucket they are allocated, the President is obligated to either give it back or buy government bonds with it to pay it back later with interest. It doesn't matter if the overall budget is negative, it matters whether that 'pot' is positive or negative.
And of course tariffs raised on executive orders have yielded more revenue than required by statute. So the tariff 'pot' is overflowed and Trump can't tell Scott Bessent to buyback a whole bunch of government bonds - the physical instrument that constitutes our debt - prior to maturation. The other inconvenient factor is that it would require the other party, US banks, to willingly sell them prior to obtaining their full yield. And they won't because of fractional reserve banking and how they calculated their risk for giving loans.
Trump is making this seem like a novel concept that only he can do, because that's his MO, but what he's doing is quite ordinary given the legal constraints of what he can do with extra revenue. Because when his fiscal policy advisors told him "no, you can't cut all these income and corporate taxes and then pay for it with tariffs due to a bunch of statutory regulations," Trump responded by throwing a tantrum and treating them like idiots until he realized they were right.
His gambit is that the Supreme Court won't call foul on his executive orders that increase tariffs and make him pay it back to the impacted nations... or if they do, the GOP led Congress will cave and pass a stimulus bill to support his policies.
Edit: Apparently this was part of the big beautiful bill all along and isn't part of the "I'm going to give tariffs back to the people" plan.
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Oh, I get it.
He gets to use the tariff money, that was a bad idea from the start, to further errode Congress's constitutional authority over spending, to try and prop up his own agenda and delusions, because the third branch of government doesnt want to seem like the bad guy.
Seems like a real waste of time to drive inflation up with tarrifs, while also causing goods to cost more, then give (some) of that money to one small group of people to try and undo the damage caused to them while letting everyone else out to dry.
Those in Kadena right now
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Edit: Apparently this was appropriated in the big beautiful bill, but Trump is still doing his "I'm the best ever" to spin it.
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We already got a couple paychecks of questionable legality earlier this FY, what’s another bonus?!
Yes, the cycle of debt will continue.
I say a dollar a burpee up to 1,776.
As a reminder, yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Billy Mitchell’s court martial. Mitchell was busted for publicly saying America was not only unprepared for the next war…they were planning on fighting the wrong war. Here is an interesting article.
www.thefp.com
America at 250: The Prophet of Air Power
One hundred years after Billy Mitchell was court-martialed for warning that America was unprepared for its next war, his heresies look less like insubordination and more like foresight. Read his story and much more in this week's America at 250 newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn.
www.thefp.com
Eh, quite a bit more to it than that. Not sure he deserved a court martial, but he kinda asked for it. And then there's the fact a lot of his assertions didn't quite pan out as he thought, even if the USAF still believes they did.