On the last business day of 2023, the US Treasury Department announced the new level of public debt, which exceeded the $34 trillion mark for the first time in history. As of the previous day (December 28), the debt level had increased by $90 billion.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Washington’s public debt now stands at about $102,000 for every man, woman and child in the US, or nearly $260,000 per household. The United States’ total debt is roughly equivalent to the economic output of China, Germany, Japan, India and the United Kingdom combined, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation (www.pgpf.org), an independent economic group. politics in New York. By comparison, China had about $14 trillion in public debt last year, according to an IMF estimate. US debt as a percentage of GDP is over 123%, compared to China’s 83%. Interest costs on U.S. debt rose to $659 billion last fiscal year, about twice the size of Russia’s entire state budget. Interest payments are estimated to be $750 billion in 2024, or over $2 billion a day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
While the US is impoverished and economically endangered, in recent years its foreign policy has been embroiled in one destructive and costly war after another, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Gaza. Over the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy goal has failed. The Taliban have returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Iraq became dependent on Iran after Saddam. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remained in power despite CIA efforts to overthrow him. Libya has been mired in a protracted civil war since Muammar Gaddafi was ousted by a US-led NATO military mission. Ukraine was mercilessly beaten on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly prevented a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Despite these remarkable and costly annihilations that followed one after the other, the same people have been at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell and others. Why;<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. Foreign policy concerns the interests of the “deep state” in Washington, in short, US foreign policy has been infiltrated by big capital, resulting in the impoverishment of the American people. Failed wars since 2000 have cost about $5 trillion in direct spending, or about $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent on veterans’ care over the next few decades. In addition to the costs directly borne by Americans, we should also consider the terrifying costs incurred abroad: Millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in destruction of infrastructure, property and nature in war zones.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
So the public debt continues to rise. U.S. military spending in 2024 will be about $1.5 trillion, or about $12,000 per household, including direct Pentagon spending, CIA and other intelligence agency budgets, the Veterans Affairs budget, the nuclear weapons program of the Department of Energy, State Department military aid to friendly countries (eg, Israel), and other budget expenditures related to US security. Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted on useless wars, on overseas military bases (750 or so) and rearmaments that bring the world closer to World War III.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Who does this military spending benefit?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n They pay off for the military-industrial complex and the “deep state” in Washington, as the more wars the greater the income for this secretive, narrow and small circle that includes the heads of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon , the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, and major military companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are no more than a thousand key people involved in foreign policy making. Public interest and debt play almost no role in the formulation of this policy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n So in theory foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, but in practice the opposite is true. This policy is carried out through relentless propaganda. George Orwell put it succinctly in ‘1984’ when suddenly and without a word of explanation ‘the Party’ moved the foreign enemy from Eurasia to East Asia. The US does essentially the same thing. Who is America’s worst enemy? Choose one according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas have all played the role of the “axis of evil” in US propaganda. Propaganda is fueled by Washington think tanks, which thrive on donations from defense companies and occasionally foreign governments that are part of US fraud operations.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But for propaganda to work, the costs of foreign policy operations must be hidden.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 1.<\/strong> In the 1960s, the US government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by conscripting young men to fight in Vietnam and raising taxes to finance the war. There was then serious resistance from the American people.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 2.<\/strong> Since the 1970s, the government has become much smarter, abolishing conscription and making military service mercenary, with the result that young people from the lower economic strata are recruited. They also shifted spending on the military budget from taxes to deficit spending, protecting it from the popular opposition that would be generated if it were financed directly by taxpayers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n In order to avoid questioning the Pentagon’s bloated budgets and the wars instigated by the executive branch, this whole system is supported by the total subordination of the US Congress to the business of war. Congressional subordination works like this:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Congressional foreign policy is not only being subverted by the military-industrial complex and the US “deep state.” The Israel lobby has long mastered the art of “buying” members of Congress. America’s complicity with the state of Israel and the wars in the Middle East (most recently in Gaza) play no role for the majority of members of Congress, and no consideration is given to whether this identification with the state of Israel serves the national security and diplomacy of USA, let alone if it is consistent with human dignity and international law.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Congress’s foreign policy is the fruit of the Israel lobby’s investments, which reached about $50 million in campaign contributions from its members in 2022 and will surpass that amount in 2024, an election year.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n US foreign policy is broken, corrupt and fraudulent. The effect of this policy is to sink the public debt into the tartars and bring the world closer to nuclear Armageddon, with peace and diplomacy in international relations remaining a pipe dream. If the American people do not reject further funding of destructive and costly wars spawned by greedy “deep state” interests, then this country faces disaster. “American exceptionalism” is blowing the whistle. Based on this argument, it is very likely that Donald Trump will return to the Presidency of the USA in the 2024 elections.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the last business day of 2023, the US Treasury Department announced the new level of public debt, which exceeded the $34 trillion mark for the first time in history. As of the previous day (December 28), the debt level had increased by $90 billion. Washington’s public debt now stands at about $102,000 for every … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,59,106],"tags":[640,237,639,121,641,638],"class_list":["post-1849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-developed-economies","category-proposed-fiscal-policies","category-us","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy","tag-foreign-policy","tag-public-debt","tag-us-congress","tag-us-debt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1849"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1851,"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions\/1851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trusteconomics.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n