Excerpt:
"Earlier this week, leaders from both major parties in the Land of the Free announced a grand bargain that, in theory, should avoid a government shutdown later this month.

According to their agreement, Congress will supposedly cap its ‘discretionary’ spending at $1.6 trillion for Fiscal Year 2024. That’s down from about $1.7 trillion in FY23.

So, yes, technically this $100 billion reduction represents about a 6% decrease over last year. And if we want to be even more cheerful about it, we could call it a 9% decrease on an inflation-adjusted basis.

If we’re being intellectually honest, that’s a step in the right direction for the US. A tiny, tiny, tiny step in the right direction.

How tiny, you ask?

Well, pretty much non-existent; the agreement to cut spending is an almost entirely symbolic gesture that won’t do much good.

Before we go further, it’s important to understand that government spending is generally categorized into three distinct buckets.

The first bucket is interest on the debt. And, at least for now, this is non-negotiable. It has to be paid.

And I don’t mean it ‘has to be paid’ in the moral sense that “America always pays its debts.”

I mean, legally, interest on the debt is automatically paid. Just like your monthly mortgage, interest payments on the US national debt get automatically sucked out of the Treasury Department’s bank account.


The second bucket is what’s known as “Mandatory Spending”, which includes programs like Social Security and Medicare. Just like the interest bucket, Mandatory Spending gets sucked out of the Treasury Department’s bank account every month.

Those two buckets– Interest payments and Mandatory Spending– constitute the vast majority of US federal spending.

The third bucket is known as Discretionary Spending… because it’s at Congress’s discretion.

Discretionary spending is what results from all their debates and arguments over annual appropriations, for everything from the military to the national parks. It also includes supplemental spending for pandemic bailouts, Ukraine, Hunter Biden artwork, etc.

So, the announcement this week was about a $100 billion reduction to Discretionary Spending.

But consider that Mandatory Spending (which Congress doesn’t touch) on Social Security alone surged $281 billion last year… and will likely increase by a similar magnitude this year.

So that single increase to Mandatory Spending will more than wipe out the entire $100 billion Discretionary Spending reduction.

Easy come, easy go.

Then there’s interest on the debt, which increased by $177 billion last fiscal year. It will probably increase by at least that much this year… which, again, more than wipes out the entire $100 billion in Discretionary Spending reduction.

If you drill down into the numbers, you’ll see pretty clearly that there are very few credible paths forward for the United States.

One path is to drastically… and I mean almost entirely… slash Discretionary Spending.

Look at it this way– last year’s Discretionary Spending was $1.7 trillion. The government is claiming that their annual budget deficit last year was also $1.7 trillion.

This means that, in order to balance the budget, they would have to almost completely eliminate ALL discretionary spending. No more military. No more Homeland Security. No more government.

In other words, one of the only ways to balance the budget would be a Zombie Apocalypse in Washington DC."
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Sounds very optimistic to me.
But Send in the zombies.