Austerity Is 'Complete Horsesh*t': Ivy League Prof Dismantles the Conservative Lie

[eniwetok]

2. and yet...

Since 1981 We The People have pissed away some 19 trillion on ourselves that we refuse to pay for. We've gotten use to, maybe addicted to, stealing this money from future taxpayers. OK, sure... some of this money was spent saving the economy from neo-lib deregulation madness... but the money was spent. What happened to the idea that debt should be paid down by those who created it? It was a mistake for Obama to make permanent all of the irresponsible Bush2 tax cuts except for the top earners.

But there's a deeper problem here that many don't want to deal with. The CBO projects interest paid on the debt will skyrocket once rates creep up... to the point that interest may be in the 700 billion a year range in the next decade.

Yikes! We only spend about 25 billion on NASA.

Interest on the debt... minus what's spent on the trust funds, is the biggest waste of money in the budget. Paying down the national debt to strengthen Social Security was a big issue in the 2000 election... yet even as that debt grew, was it even mentioned in the 2016 election?

If our two parties refuse to deal with important issues like this... then has our system become functionally braindead?