65
Feds end 2024 with $1.8 trillion deficit; national debt nears $36 trillion.
(www.thecentersquare.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
65 points (82.2% liked)
News
23170 readers
3092 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Insanity
Sounds like it's time to elect some Democrats. They always bring the budget in line, and are the only party in a quarter century to run a surplus.
That was one of the theories around the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire ..... towards the end, wealth became so concentrated to just a few wealthy families, empire kept expanding and having to pay for stuff but nothing was left to pay for anything else and every other non-wealthy citizen had to fend for themselves. The machine got to be so top heavy that nothing was left to support it so it just slowly dissolved and crashed.
I wouldn't worry about it though .... just give it a few hundred years and we'll probably do it all again.
I can't say that I really buy that. Wealth was always concentrated in Rome. I'm going to assume that you mean the Western Roman Empire because the whole Roman Empire lasted until 1453 although there was a brief time that Crusaders took it over. If it were true, both sides of the empire would have fallen since they both operated the same.
The Empire definitely had quite a few issues. The debasement of the coinage led to some pretty significant inflation. It got so bad that Diocletian basically got rid of the mint and went with a very complex goods conversion system. But that was in the 3rd century. The Western Roman Empire had a hell of a lot more tribes bordering them to contend with while the East largely just had the Sassanids. The rules of succession were pretty lax too and many emperors avoided making successors until their death bed. That is fine if the emperor has a slow and predictable death but when they didn't, people (often military leaders) would simply claim they were emperor and take their armies and take over. That gave an opening for outside tribes to take advantage of the chaos.
Yes it was ... the trouble was that in the early part of the empire, there were many wealthy individuals and a fairly large wealthy middle class citizenry ... wealth was concentrated but at least there were many, many wealthy people.
But generally speaking (I'm no historian, I've just read lots about it so this is my own interpretation) ... as the empire grew, conquered more and stretched itself further, more wealth went to the wealthiest, and the military needed more soldiers, being a soldier meant you had to be citizen but you had to leave your land - leave your land, you made no money, so you sold your land - now you are a full time soldier with no land and your only life is the military - meanwhile your land gets bought for cheap by wealthy land owners - multiply all this for about a hundred years and now you have a few wealthy families with all the land (and all the say in where to fight) and a landless middle class who have no option but the military .... the wealthy don't want to give up control so they free up citizenship to more and more non-Romans ... now you have a situation where all of mainland Rome is owned by a few people with all the money (but do no actual fighting), the rest of the people there are either slaves or don't own anything and the army is becoming filled with people who have never been to mainland Rome and have allegiance to it.
Wealth got concentrated to a very small group of people ... and nothing was left to support it ... so it collapsed.
We are basically doing the same thing today and the only way we seem to want to sustain it is through perpetual war (which can not be sustained either)
Like I said ... I wouldn't worry about it because we'll probably repeat it again in a few hundred years ... we always have.
That's worse than my credit card interest rate.