The Gray Lady Notices US Debt and Calls it a Problem!

Surprise! The New York Times Gets Something Right!

“The federal debt starts the new year at a level that is hard to grasp: $34 trillion. That is 1.2 times the U.S.’s annual economic output. At the end of World War II, the ratio was only about 1.1.”

Count us thunderstruck!  The preceding paragraph is something we would write, urging you to take refuge in gold and silver.  Instead, it is a lead paragraph in the New York Times.  

It continues:

“Both parties have contributed to the situation. Republicans have passed large tax cuts. Democrats have enacted ambitious climate and health care initiatives. Both funneled money to Americans in response to the Covid pandemic.

“For years, many economists believed the country’s debt was not a problem. Interest rates were low, which held down debt payments. Inflation was also low, which suggested the debt wasn’t hampering the economy.

“But times have changed, and federal deficits now look scarier.”

How could the New York Times, which seems to get everything wrong (think Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, Judith Miller, Paul Krugman, Nikole Hannah-Jones and so many others that we grow weary), see the national debt and use a word like scary?

We’re suspicious.  We fear the worst: more bad policy editorials to come.

The piece concludes this way: “At some point, though, the federal government will likely need to raise taxes and cut spending in ways that many Americans will find unpleasant.”

Based on long precedent, we suspect that the Times will be among the chief cheerleaders for tax hikes.  And when it comes to the other side of the equation, it will mostly look away.  Any spending cuts its leftists endorse will likely not come out of its international enthusiasm like the war in Ukraine.  When, like Ukraine, another one of its interventions goes bad, the paper just starts pounding the drums for a new elective war elsewhere.  

When the debt was still solvable it encouraged more debt.  But as we entered 2024, the national debt passed $34 trillion.  That is more than $100,000 per American.  Look around you.  Look at people working in fast-food restaurants.  Look at the elderly, those past their working years and living on Social Security.  Look at people living under overpasses.  How will they pay their share?  How will you pay your share, or your share and their share?  They won’t.  You won’t.  It won’t be paid – except by the nation-destroying fraud of inflation.

The “newspaper of record’s” notice of the debt problem now tells us that we are entering the crisis stage, which ends not judiciously but in an unstoppable string of painful calamities.  

The New York Times never appears to learn from history.  But we do.  When the debt cannot be paid, it will not be paid.  The people – ordinary folks like you and your friends and family who were not responsible – will be left holding the bag and will be impoverished by financial events.  Except, that is, for those who have moved out of “the debt dollar” and taken refuge in the enduring money of the ages:  gold and silver.