For nations, debt spending is not necessarily a bad thing. Whether it is wise or foolhardy for a country to borrow money really depends on what it is being spent on.
For example, the last time America’s national debt exceeded America’s gross domestic product was during World War II. I would say that it was worth going into debt to defeat the Nazis and to smash imperialist Japan.
Today, as the national debt soared past GDP for the first time in eight decades, here are a few of the big things we are spending so much money on now:
Keeping Law School Accessible When Federal Loans Fall Short
As federal borrowing caps tighten financing options for law students, one organization is stepping in to negotiate the terms they can't secure alone.
- Servicing the debt
- A pointless war against Iran that has put the U.S. in a far worse position than it was in before the war
- Medicare and Social Security for Baby Boomers, the richest generation in the history of the world
- Tearing down a third of the White House and replacing it with a gilded ballroom
- Tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people
- Sending the Department of Homeland Security to terrorize left-leaning cities under the guise of immigration enforcement
Other than perhaps some of the Medicare and Social Security payments, these are not worthwhile things to go into debt for. They are still better than President Donald Trump’s latest scheme to siphon away taxpayer dollars, however.
Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, an agency he is ultimately in charge of. To settle his nonsensical lawsuit against himself, the Department of Justice, which he also runs, announced it is paying $1.776 billion (cute) of taxpayers’ money into an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate the people an unaccountable panel of Trump’s henchmen decides were wrongly targeted by the Biden administration.
Yes, the guy who goaded his DOJ into prosecuting James Comey for posting a photo of seashells thinks it was the Biden administration that wrongly targeted people.
LexisNexis Practical Guidance Rolls Out Dedicated Practice Area for AI & Technology
The new generation of AI-related legal issues are inherently cross-disciplinary, implicating corporate law, intellectual property, data privacy, employment, corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
it is hard to characterize this fund as anything other than outright theft. Trump supposedly can’t receive money directly from the fund, but don’t expect his family members and his businesses to keep their hands out of the cookie jar.
Of course, those who were in fact “wrongly targeted” by any presidential administration already had the right to pursue their own lawsuits. The problem with a lawsuit for the people this money is intended for is that a judge or jury would have to decide on the applicability of that “wrongly” part. The government targets people all the time, for, ya know, breaking the law. When they are convicted, that typically means they were rightly targeted.
Nearly 1,600 people were charged with crimes for their participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump pardoned the January 6 rioters, and now he wants to make them millionaires using taxpayer dollars. Trump is stealing your money to redistribute it to his loyal thugs.
We do not know for sure who will get this money, but if it actually starts winding up in pockets I’ll eat my hat if there aren’t January 6 insurrectionists on the list of beneficiaries. It seems incredible that no one is going to stop this, but the judge overseeing Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS already closed the case, and we’ll all die of old age waiting for this Congress to step up and defend the power it is supposed to have over federal spending.
“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Donald K. Sherman.
For over a decade, Trump has repeatedly promised to pay down and even to eliminate the national debt. He was lying.
In a matter of days, the total national debt will surge past $40 trillion. We are not reaching this record-shattering milestone as a necessary burden in order to purge the world of a great evil like in World War II. No, this time we are leveraging our children’s futures to pay for one man’s foolish war, to build one man’s monuments to himself, and to reward one man’s corrupt allies.
Whether you voted for him or not, you will be paying — literally — for Trump’s presidency for the rest of your life. As for recipients of “Anti-Weaponization Fund” tax dollars, just know that the moment Trump is gone, we’re coming to get our money back.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].