Tag: debt

Washington is driving America toward a debt crisis we can’t ignore any longer

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. Those words are widely attributed to Alexander Tytler, the Scottish judge and historian who lived from 1747 to 1813. There is, however, some debate over the attribution. Historians and researchers have questioned whether Tytler actually wrote the passage in the form in which it is commonly quoted, whether he expressed a similar idea that was later expanded and attributed to him, or whether the passage originated elsewhere. The exact authorship may be debatable. The warning itself is not.

Here is the prophetic quote:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

This is no idle warning. Look at the United States today and the pattern is hard to miss. This is exactly what is happening today.

Our founders were statesmen who sacrificed much to create a system focused on the common good. They had businesses, farms, and families, and they risked everything to build a limited government unlike any the world had seen. Today we are governed largely by professional politicians, many of whom have never signed the front of a paycheck or run a business. Their careers are spent in government, and they are focused on re-election, promising voters increasingly more, but not paying for these programs.

The late Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a practicing physician, saw this coming. In his book “The Debt Bomb”, written 15 years ago, he warned of the fiscal path we were on. The problems he described are here.

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More than 400 Canadians filing for bankruptcy every day as rates hit financial-crisis levels

More than 400 Canadians are filing for bankruptcy every day as bankruptcy rates climb to their highest level since the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Nancy Snedden, president of BDO Debt Solutions and host of Your Money on VOCM, says the current pace works out to roughly 17 Canadians filing for bankruptcy every hour.

That’s approximately 408 Canadians every day.

More than 37,000 Canadians filed for bankruptcy during the second quarter of 2026, according to Snedden, representing a 6.9% increase compared with the same period last year.

The increase comes as Canadian households face growing pressure from everyday expenses and debt payments.

A recent Equifax Canada report found more Canadians are struggling to make ends meet and keep up with their monthly bills and debt obligations.

The latest figures also come amid a broader increase in insolvencies. Federal Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy data released earlier this month showed June recorded the second-highest number of consumer insolvencies for that month on record and marked the sixth consecutive year of increasing June insolvencies.

Canadian households have spent years dealing with elevated living costs and higher borrowing costs, putting additional pressure on people carrying mortgages, credit-card balances and other debts.

Snedden encouraged Canadians facing financial trouble to seek help and investigate available debt-relief options before their situation worsens.

At the current pace cited by BDO, more than 12,000 Canadians would be filing for bankruptcy every month.

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“Doom Loop” Engaged: US Debt Hits $40 Trillion As Treasury Enters The Endgame

The largely expected news came just hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unexpectedly announced the Treasury’s latest attempt to rein-in long-term borrowing costs from multi-year highs, the most important component of the growth in debt. The Treasury stunned the market when it said, just two weeks after the latest Refunding Announcement where it should have made this change, that it was ramping up the support for longer-dated securities by “increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector).”

The announcement that sent yields plunging, if only for the time being. 

Remarkably, it was less than 5 years ago that US debt hit $30 trillion back in January 2022, illustrating the rapid growth in federal borrowing needs. And there’s no end in sight. 

As Bloomberg notes, “Republicans have long opposed revenue-raising tax increases,” while Democrats are best known for spending like drunken sailors to maximize socialist central planning, and both parties are loathe to sign on to politically toxic cuts to healthcare and retirement benefits for seniors. Many observers anticipate Congress and the administration of the day will only act if forced by a financial-market disruption.

That won’t stop them from talking about it all the time, though, as both parties at least pretend to understand that the US is on a catastrophic collision course should debt growth continue at this pace, and if the AI bet – which is now an all-in for virtually everyone – fails to dramatically boost productivity. Bessent, for one, said a key reason he got involved in politics was to help tackle deficits running at a pace unprecedented for times outside of major wars, pandemics or depressed job markets. So far he has failed catastrophically, and worse, he is doing precisely the kind of activist issuance “Twisting” for which he bashed his predecessor, Janet Yellen.

Economists, the Congressional Budget Office and Wall Street all see little or no progress in coming years for the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio.

“Optically, I’m sure crossing thresholds like $40 trillion will focus attention on the issue in the near term,” said Matthew Luzzetti, chief US economist at Deutsche Bank AG. “But it does not represent a magical threshold for debt dynamics, and projections have anticipated this outcome for some time.”

More important, Luzzetti said, is the climb in US Treasury yields, which is steadily increasing the cost of servicing the record debt load. Last Thursday, the department’s latest 30-year bond auction resulted in the costliest such sale in a quarter century. A 10-year auction a day earlier drew the highest financing cost at that tenor since 2007, and only today’s announcement which sent yields tumbling prevent today’s 20Y Treasury auction from pricing at the highest yield on record. 

As buyers demand higher yields, that in turn drives up the Treasury’s borrowing needs. With two months left to go in the fiscal year, the government’s tally for interest costs so far for 2026 is $1.37 trillion – a 20% increase on the same period a year before. That in turn adds to the debt, potentially fueling further investor calls for higher rates, in a pattern known as a “doom loop.”

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With debt near $40 trillion, GOP bills would tie debt hikes to spending cuts

As the U.S. nears a mid-2027 debt-limit deadline with debt approaching $40 trillion, two Republican bills would bar Congress from raising the ceiling without matching any increased spending with spending cuts elsewhere.

The Dollar-for-Dollar Deficit Reduction Act, introduced separately by U.S. Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming and Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., would require any increase or suspension of the debt limit to be matched by equal or greater spending cuts over the current year and the following 10 years. It would be enforced through a congressional point of order. The National Taxpayers Union supports the measure.

“Congress cannot keep raising the credit limit on the American people without cutting up the credit card,” Steube said in announcing the bill. “If Congress wants to raise the credit limit, Congress must cut spending by the same amount.”

The national debt stands at $39.9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, closing in on the $41.1 trillion ceiling that Congress raised by $5 trillion in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a tax-and-spending law.

Fitch Ratings projected that the government will hit that ceiling around mid-2027, with several months more before it exhausts the extraordinary measures that stave off default.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, which tracks the deadline, is trending toward the earlier end of that window. Shai Akabas, the group’s vice president of economic policy, told The Center Square that weaker-than-expected tariff revenue and higher deficits are pulling the date forward, leaving “another six to nine months” of extraordinary measures once the ceiling is hit “before the government could no longer pay all of its bills in full and on time.”

The bills would bar accounting methods that let past deficit deals count savings that never materialized. Net interest savings could not count toward the required cuts, and lawmakers could not shift spending outside the 10-year window to meet the target. The Congressional Budget Office would have to score any debt-limit bill and post the estimate publicly for 24 hours before a vote. Waiving the point of order would take 60 Senate votes.

All three major credit-rating agencies have downgraded U.S. debt – Standard & Poor’s in 2011, Fitch in 2023 and Moody’s in 2025 – each pointing to the nation’s rising debt and Washington’s failure to address it. S&P and Fitch specifically cited debt-ceiling standoffs. S&P warned more than a decade ago that “the statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips.”

Neither bill has drawn a Democratic cosponsor. The mechanism draws its force from the debt ceiling itself: because the point of order applies only to debt-limit legislation, the pressure to accept the required cuts builds against the deadline for avoiding a default. House Budget Committee Democrats did not respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

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The Fourth Turning Global War Has Already Bankrupted America — And Nobody’s Counting the Bodies

The numbers came in just after dawn on the East Coast, and they told a story that no amount of White House spin could obscure. Oil futures had stabilized at $86 per barrel overnight—a figure that would have seemed catastrophic eighteen months ago but now represented a temporary reprieve from the $119 spike that had crippled global markets in April. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that emergency backstop established after the 1973 crisis, had fallen to 305 million barrels, its lowest level since 1983. The Congressional Budget Office quietly released its revised deficit projections: $2.3 trillion for fiscal year 2026, with another $1.8 trillion locked in for 2027 before accounting for the war’s accelerating costs, currently running at $1 billion per day with no exit strategy visible on any horizon.

This is not a recession. This is not a “period of heightened geopolitical tension.” This is the systematic dismantling of the global economic architecture that has sustained Western prosperity for eighty years, compressed into a timeframe too brief for institutional adaptation. We are witnessing, in real-time, the transition from a unipolar American-led order to a fragmented multipolar system, and the violence of that transition is being measured not just in body counts—though those are mounting in ways the Pentagon refuses to fully disclose—but in the erosion of strategic leverage that cannot be recovered once spent.

The Fourth Turning Global War has entered its terminal phase, and the metrics suggest we are only beginning to comprehend the depth of the strategic trap into which American policy has walked.

To understand the present crisis, one must first abandon the comforting narrative of accidental drift—the notion that policy errors and miscalculation have led to the current impasse. The data suggests something more troubling: a decoupling of strategic decision-making from national interest calculation, producing outcomes that serve no identifiable American objective while advancing the interests of regional actors with disproportionate influence over U.S. policy formation.

Consider the timeline with the precision of a military after-action report. On February 27, 2026, the United States initiated a surprise decapitation strike against Iranian leadership while Israeli envoys maintained ostensible negotiations in Geneva. The strike eliminated Iran’s military command structure and political leadership in a forty-eight-hour bombardment that the White House initially projected would conclude within “four to five weeks.” That projection, made on March 1, has now stretched to month five with no conclusion visible. The Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty percent of global petroleum flows, has been effectively closed since mid-March. Iranian ballistic missile strikes, utilizing Chinese targeting data and Russian satellite intelligence, have damaged or destroyed every major U.S. installation in the Persian Gulf, including Al Udeid in Qatar, Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia, and the naval facilities at Bahrain.

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Argentina’s Milei Borrows Warren Buffett’s Idea To Punish Deficit-Spending Politicians

More than two years after campaigning to “blow up” Argentina’s central bank, President Javier Milei has announced his “Fiscal Shackle” bill – a permanent rule aimed at preventing Argentina from approving or maintaining budgets with fiscal deficits that could have consequences for politicians.

On Thursday, in a speech recorded at the Casa Rosada and broadcast nationwide, Milei proposed an overhaul that would restore the Central Bank of Argentina’s sole mandate of preserving the currency’s value, stop direct and indirect financing of the Treasury, provinces, and municipalities, and expose officials who violate the rules to criminal charges. “It will be considered fraud and illicit association,” he explained.

Milei said this is the “most important set of structural reforms in the last 91 years,” taking the year of the Central Bank’s founding, 1935, as the starting point for that period. He argued that the central bank has functioned as “a tool for theft” and indicated that his reform proposal seeks “to put an end to the scam of counterfeiting money to finance high-level politics, whose most evident manifestation is the inflation rate.”

The plan would also strengthen independence of central bank officials, making them more difficult for future administrations to remove. Milei said the reforms were an effort to end decades of deficit monetization, the primary source of Argentina’s recurring inflation and currency crises.

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Money Issues, Paranoia, And A Hurled Phone: Blistering Reports Detail Ken Martin’s Collapsing DNC

The Democratic National Committee is running on fumes, and chairman Ken Martin is headed for a full-blown mental breakdown, according to a pair of blistering reports.

A New York Times report published Sunday revealed that the committee is $2 million in the hole and begging vendors to sit on their invoices until after the midterms.

The DNC quietly put the Southeast Washington building up as collateral last year to land a $15 million line of credit and bankroll off-year races, according to DC deed records not previously reported, according to NOTUS. The party has pawned the property, which it only partially owns, in past cycles. But going back to the well ahead of 2026 for the biggest off-year loan in committee history set off alarms among members who saw it as one more flashing red light.

“Ken gaslighting us about the DNC’s finances and not being transparent about the financial situation makes us doubt if he can oversee the DNC during the most important primary of our lifetime,” an unnamed DNC member told NOTUS.

The Republican National Committee is sitting on $128.5 million, and President Trump’s main super PAC, MAGA Inc., closed out June with roughly $400 million in the bank.

The DNC has downplayed the alarm. Roger Lau, the committee’s executive director, told the Times that the request for vendors to hold their invoices was “nothing more than standard negotiations with vendors over contracts and payment processes.”

Meanwhile, the pressure mounting on Martin is showing, according to the Times:

In a pique of frustration in early July, he threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide while upbraiding the person. The phone-tossing incident resulted in a formal complaint to the D.N.C.’s human resources department.

The fallout from the phone-throwing episode was described by half a dozen people familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal party matters. None of them witnessed the encounter, and there was some dispute over how aggressively the phone was tossed. Mr. Martin was said to have thrown the phone at the desk, rather than at the aide.

Unsurprisingly, the DNC refused to comment on the incident.

To make matters worse, Martin has reportedly developed a “growing sense of paranoia” about a possible push to dump him and is “paralyzed by the idea of leaks.”

“It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building,” Martin lamented during a meeting in May. “No more of that shit. No more.“

“My success is your success,” he added. “So the weaker I am, the weaker all of you are.”

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He Helped Build Obama’s Legacy. The Job Cost Him His Company.

Mike Owen spent years helping build the Obama Idolatry Worship Center Obama Presidential Center. On June 25, the owner and president of Adamson Plumbing Contractors suspended operations, laid off 25 union workers, and abandoned about six other construction jobs.

Breitbart News:

“Before the center opened, Owen said the project had left his company with $3.9 million in losses tied to delays, rework, labor overruns, and changing project demands. He said he spent months negotiating with Lakeside Alliance, the project’s construction manager, before going public after failing to reach a resolution,” the article read.

Indeed, the center was reportedly also costing taxpayers more and more money as it put out a call for unpaid volunteers even though its chief executive would be paid a salary of $740,000, according to reports.

In regard to Owen’s battle over the nearly $4 million payment dispute, his company that performed the work under the name Marsh-Adamson, has filed a $1.72 million mechanic’s lien against the center’s property in an effort to be paid for the work.

“Laying off close to 30 people is something that no owner in our industry wants to do. It’s a hard thing to do, especially when you know you can finish them and the company can still make money. But we were put in a pretty bad corner,” he said.

A project promoted as an investment in Chicago’s South Side had become, in Owen’s account, the job that pushed his company to the edge.

Owen says Adamson lost about $3.9 million through delays, rework, labor overruns, and changing demands. The company performed roughly $12 million in work after starting with a bid near $6.9 million. Marsh-Adamson, the name used for its work on the center, has filed a $1.72 million mechanic’s lien against the property.

The immediate break came just before the center opened on June 19. Owen says Lakeside Alliance, the project’s construction manager, agreed to release $100,000 if Adamson supplied two journeyman plumbers for last-minute nighttime work. His crew completed the assignment, but the money didn’t arrive before the opening.

Lakeside eventually sent the $100,000, along with about $35,000 for change orders. The payments arrived more than two weeks after Adamson had suspended operations and dismissed its workers. The money reduced a debt to one supplier, but it didn’t reverse the shutdown.

Owen has moved out of his company’s building and is working from home while attorneys handle the dispute. He says Adamson may regroup in September, but its future remains uncertain.

After 35 years in the industry, he may now have to find a job.

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Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

Look at what Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle officially owe, and the numbers seem large but manageable. Look off the books, and a second, bigger pile of debt appears.

A Nikkei study put that hidden figure at $1.65 trillion, up roughly eightfold in four years. It is more than the $1.35 trillion the five report outright.

The Enron echo

The money is tied up in off-balance-sheet vehicles, the same kind of structure Enron used to hide debt before it collapsed 25 years ago. Back then it was fraud. Now, tightened rules and fuller disclosures make it legal.

The tools are still there, though. “Enron’s crime wasn’t having special purpose vehicles,” analyst Gil Luria told Bloomberg Law. “Enron’s crime was hiding them.”

The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts.

Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants.

Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.

The numbers behind the boom

The scale is the story. Meta’s off-balance-sheet debt alone is about $420 billion, nearly triple its reported debt. Oracle’s has grown roughly thirtyfold in four years.

It is all in service of the same race. The industry is expected to spend more than $3 trillion through 2028 building and equipping AI data centres, much of it financed against the chips inside them.

Why it matters now

The timing is awkward. Four of the five report earnings in the next two weeks, and the reported debt will look tidy. The $1.65 trillion sitting in the footnotes will not make the headlines.

The catch is what happens later. When a data centre goes live, its lease rolls onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the facility is marked down, and the loss lands on the lenders and insurers who funded it.

Some already see the risk. S&P has cut Oracle’s credit rating over stretched leverage, and both Morgan Stanley and Moody’s have flagged the wider issue. “What if one of these companies was a house of cards,” asked accounting consultant Tom Selling, “and was propping itself up with this accounting treatment?”

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Department of Labor Announces Gavin Newsom’s California Owes OVER $22 BILLION to U.S. Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund – The ONLY State Still in Debt, Slamming Businesses with Higher Federal Payroll Taxes

The radical left’s favorite golden boy is running the once-great state of California straight into the ground.

The Trump Labor Department announced Wednesday that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s failed administration owes more than $22 billion to the U.S. Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund.

This staggering debt comes from loans California took during the COVID-19 pandemic to pay unemployment benefits — benefits that were looted by massive fraud under Newsom’s watch. California is now the only state in the entire country with an outstanding federal unemployment insurance loan balance.

As a direct result, California business owners are being forced to pay higher federal payroll taxes to bail out Sacramento’s incompetence and corruption. Every other state that borrowed during the pandemic has repaid its loans. Not Newsom’s California.

During and after the pandemic, California raked in record budget surpluses, at one point nearing $100 billion. Instead of using that taxpayer windfall to repay the federal loan like responsible states did, Newsom and the Democrat supermajority in Sacramento sat on the money, spent it on other priorities, and let the debt balloon with interest.

The state has paid $1.8 billion in interest since 2021, with Newsom’s latest budget proposing another $668 million in interest payments this year while putting zero dollars toward the actual principal.

The bill keeps growing. The California EDD’s UI Fund Forecast officially projects the outstanding loan balance to reach $22.0 billion by the end of 2026.

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