it’s like you believe you can tariff them expecting they won’t do the same. Why do you believe the rest of the world is not going to retaliate and why do you believe America can prosper without the rest of the world?
What’s the point of having a military alliance with countries you puts tariffs on? That’s unfriendly to say the least.
While the amount of debt has been ever growing, it hasn’t relative to GDP. When it has grown, it’s grown primarily due to policies from Bush and Trump. Both of these president’s also passed massive tax breaks which is a significant contributing factor to the national debt.
At the end of the day, the national debt only matters if we can’t pay it. All the cuts being made to federal spending right now are more significant because they will slow down the economy and cause reverberations for years to come (public research and investment are multipliers for the economy in many ways).
As you call out, we should be taxing billionaires, which points to the larger economic concern right now for America - economic disparity.
Right now, the National Debt is ~125% of the GDP and is estimated to climb - we’ll know more March 27th when the quarterly report is published.
I had to do some research on this one because I wasn’t too familiar with how much weight the ratio factors in. For example, Japan is over 200%, but they’re well off due to societal/governmental factors such as low interest rates, high sovereign savings, and keeping a portion of the debt local to the nation itself. On the other hand, Greece is ~160% due to their last recession. They had worker strikes in 2024 due to stagnating wages, but they’re a come back with economic growth projected to hit ~2% and debt ratio to be at ~145% by the end of the year so it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
That being said, the U.S. is in quite a different situation economically. From what I can tell, it’s not great, but not catastrophic either. If our economic growth continues it’s upward trend, maybe we can balance it out. But, if our National Debt continues to grow, or if our GDP starts to taper off, the % gap may widen and we may see a slow and steady downturn in QoL. The economists I ran across seemed to agree that it could be a growing issue and something to keep an eye on how it’s handled. I thought this blogpost was a good read - it doesn’t get into all the nuance but is a decent summary / overlook. For an official overlook you can read the House Summary.
Finally, this is from the approved House 2025 Budget Document (or bill? idk), if you trust that, but it says:
On a sidenote, mmw kinda thing, I don’t think DJT is going to be a good fit for this situation. I don’t think the mixing of corporate interests, deregulation, and shaking of trees is going to pull us out of this mess but entrench the Nation. The only way out is to explain to regular people that our only solution is to tax the Billionaire class, and get our local politicians to enact change.