https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/22/alan-greenspan-former-chairm...
https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al...
The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these chickens will come home to roost in some way or another. But it is hard to predict when.
So he was in favour of the gold standard because it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
Further, sticking to the gold standard made the Great Depression worse as it reduced flexibility and options of central banks had, and made deflation worse:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w3488
The sooner countries left the gold standard the sooner they started recovering from the Great Depression:
I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.
If we want to talk about the causes of the 'New Gilded Age' that's something else. As a general starting point I'd begin with:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
Is there evidence for this?
During the Gold Standard era there were many periods of deflation, which is bad for people with debt: back in the day this was often farmers, nowadays it'd be anyone with student loans or a mortgage.
A simple and logical pattern.
1) Unconstrained spending without commensurate taxation leads to a required inflation of the money supply
2) An inflation of the money supply with increase the price of assets relative to the value of the currency.
3) Asset owners thus become "more valuable" by measure of currency.
4) Renters / non-asset-owners have to eat the costs of inflation while benefiting by none of the inflationary pressure on assets.
ergo - a gold standard is just a proxy for "constraints on debt" is a force that acts against inequality between asset owners and non-asset owners.
> 3) Asset owners thus become "more valuable" by measure of currency.
Under the Gold Standard the currency itself is also an asset, much more so than under (so-called) fiat.
In a supply-demand situation where supply is finite, and demand is potentially limitless, then the suppliers can charge higher prices. When the demand is for money itself, the price is the interest that is charged by the suppliers (lenders, financiers) can be higher.
And not just in good times when everyone is trying to get a piece of the action: the historical records shows interest rate hikes during major economic events (e.g., 1857, 1873, 1893, 1896, and 1907) when risk was higher.
> 4) Renters / non-asset-owners have to eat the costs of inflation while benefiting by none of the inflationary pressure on assets.
Inflation helps debtors:
> If wages increase with inflation, and if the borrower already owed money before the inflation occurred, inflation benefits the borrower. This is because the borrower still owes the same amount of money, but now they have more money in their paycheck to pay off the debt. This results in less interest for the lender if the borrower uses the extra money to pay off their debt early.
* https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111414/does-inflati...
You know what would fix a distributionary problem? A (re)distributionary solution.
The most obvious one is progressive/wealth taxation (a ceiling) and UBI (a floor).
Keep competitive market dynamics, narrow the window in which they're allowed to operate and add some hard constraints.
Tax, and hire millions of people for a good living wage to do things that either need to be done and aren't (infrastructure repairs and improvements, inspections of all flavors, etc), or that don't really need to be done but make some fraction of the population happy (unnecessarily beautiful post offices).
Well, that's good because that's not what limiting the money supply does. It _acts as a force against inequality_. It doesn't _fix_ or _prevent_ inequality that already exists and doesn't claim to stop organic inequalities from arising - but it does put a limit on inequality resulting from an inflation of the money supply.
In all cases where inequality went down, it was helped by inflationary spending.
Yet Gold Standard (and its intellectual descendants) directly led to several examples of stagnation. The most recent one was in Europe, it lost a decade of growth after 2008 by insisting on austerity.
bro your argument hinges on "probably" and then completely ignores it
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/fox-cites-ownership-...
The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies.
https://explaininghistory.org/2025/06/12/golden-fetters-the-...
We are essentially replaying the greenback inflation of the 1860's and have been doing it since 1971.
So-called fiat money didn't become a thing until after FDR became president, which was after 1932.
” The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 precipitated a U.S. recession, but it was the gold standard that converted this into a worldwide depression. With currencies locked to gold, there was little scope to ease monetary conditions. When the U.S. economy slumped, its import demand plummeted and it exported deflation to the rest of the world. Gold-standard countries could not respond by cutting interest rates or letting their currencies depreciate to stimulate exports – their priority was to defend the peg. As a result, economic downturns spread rapidly.”
What "rapid industrialization" is happening today?
Inequality (at least in the US) started growing in the 1980s, after Reagan got elected. For causes I'd start with these:
Cite? I'm pretty sure that the 1920s, $20 was literally a gold coin of a certain size.
Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.
Reckless spending post WW2 was the main reason the US shot itself in the foot and got into this position where they couldn't reasonably pay most clients back and France saw this developing.
All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
France was not panic hoarding anything. It was converting its UK pound-sterling holdings to gold so that it could be more independent of other countries by having its own currency better backed without an 'intermediary' conversion through London.
There was no "panic" involved, just simple fairness: if the UK and US could have physical gold in their vaults, why couldn't France?
And now it seems to be the US' turn in returning the favor. First 2007ff (caused by irresponsible actors in the financial world), then the lackluster response to Covid and Russia's invasion against Ukraine, and now we're set to look at the AI bubble collapsing, a bubble much much larger than Lehman Brothers ever was.
> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:
And the Gilded Age [1] ended long before the gold standard. Which makes sense since the Gilded Age is a political issue not a monetary one; how will the productivity from railroads be redistributed?
> It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:
A comparison of 35 years against 4?
That's like bragging about how smart private credit is by showing the low volatility in it's price over the past year.
The large concern from gold bugs is that by printing money we just make the next crash even larger. But of course we just print more in the next crash so it doesn't happen. Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.
---
IMO, the real argument against the Gold Standard is that the US left it is because we spent more money than we made to finance the Vietnam War. If we returned to it, then we'd just leave it again when it became inconvenient. It's not the Gold Standard that needs fixing in the country.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
[2]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
> A comparison of 35 years against 4?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
Panics and economic downturns during the Gold Standard period were much more frequency. The term "Great Depression" used to refer to something else besides what happened in the 1930s, and the gold standard was a contributing factor to that as well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
> Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.
On the Gold Standard the flexibility of emergency spending during bad years would not be possible: see 1930-1932, and then again in 1937–1938 when FDR tried to go back to balanced budgets through austerity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937–1938
The politicians that tend to talk about "hard money" and responsible spending are the GOP—but who only seem to talk about it when a Democrat is in the White House. When their guy is in then it's all tax cuts, which do not pay for themselves:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
and spending (see >$1T Pentagon budget(s)). They're mostly trying to roll back the New Deal (and later Great Society) and cut social programs:
The U.S. officially left the gold standard on August 15, 1971.
https://blog.swissamerica.com/glossary/gold-standard/
> many progressive elements rallied against it when it was in effect:
Bryan wanted a gold and silver standard, not fiat currency. There was also the Greenback-Labor Party who wanted to get off both gold and silver standard. They favored inflation because the gold and silver backed currencies were causing deflation.
You seem to be cherry picking in hopes that people do not know the history of the time.
Farmers and regular people were drowning in debt while the money shortage created a deflationary cycle.
Silver is more plentiful and more volatile - Bryan wanted a fixed 16:1 ratio with gold.
The magic of fiat is that as long as you have working governance, modest inflation and plentiful credit equals prosperity.
Yes, but what does "bimetallism" mean?
> The Cross of Gold speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan, a former United States Representative from Nebraska, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. In his address, Bryan supported "free silver" (i.e. bimetallism), which he believed would bring the nation prosperity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
> Free silver was a major economic policy issue in the United States in the late 19th century. Its advocates were in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold standard.
[…]
> While all agreed that an expanded money supply would inevitably inflate prices, the issue was whether this inflation would be beneficial or not. The issue peaked from 1893 to 1896, when the economy was suffering from a severe depression characterized by falling prices (deflation), high unemployment in industrial areas, and severe distress for farmers.[1] It ranks as the 11th largest decline in U.S. stock market history.[2]
[…]
> As a result, the monetary value of silver coins was based on government fiat rather than on the commodity value of their contents, and this became especially true following silver strikes in the West, which further depressed the silver price. From that time until the early 1960s the silver content in United States dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars was worth only a fraction of their face values.[10] Free coinage of silver would have amounted to an increase in the money supply, resulting in inflation.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver
Hard and soft money exists on a spectrum, and it seems to be that "free silver" is a move away from hard and towards soft/fiat, and more monetary flexibility.
You don't credit an arsonist with "keeping a homeless person warm" when they set a homeless person on fire...
I don't think anyone really holds him responsible for the dotnet crash of 2000 as that was a market issue and irrational exuberance issue and not a monetary one.
And 2008 was similar. The Fed doesn't control or have any responsibility for lower lender standards or ARM mortgages.
Congress was responsible for the GSE's that bought any mortgages and wrote insurance on those mortgages, so you can't blame the FED for that.
Wallstreet are their regulators were responsible for the securitization of mortgages that went bad in 2008, not the FED.
At worst you can say they had the wrong monetary policy but that's an opinion and not something that can be said as a fact.
Can you flesh out how you feel Greenspan is responsible for 2008?
As for the Great Recession, taking the Fed Funds rate from 6.5% to 1.0% and holding it there for a year was the catalyst for driving everyone into the mortgage market looking for returns. And then did not regulate subprime lending or the shadow banking market:
"As the housing market boomed, subprime mortgage originations skyrocketed from 8.2% of all mortgages in 2003 to 23.5% in 2006. The Fed possessed the authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to crack down on predatory lending and loose underwriting standards but chose not to act aggressively."
"The Fed failed to properly monitor off-balance-sheet vehicles, investment bank leverage, and complex derivatives like mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Because these instruments developed outside traditional commercial banking oversight, a highly leveraged 'shadow banking' system grew completely unchecked under the Fed's watch."
So yeah, the Fed has its fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. Lots of blame to go around though..
Greenspan felt Greenspan was responsible for 2008.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel....
He set the stage for the financial crisis that started crumbling a year after he left the fed chair. It wasn't all his fault (politicians lost any spine and bankers any sense), but he was the conductor.
Shortly after he left a bank with over 150 years of history collapsed due to exactly that sort of mismanagement, triggering a crisis for the entire banking sector.
Congratulations on your new job. To help you out, I've enclosed three pieces of advice to follow when you encounter an intractable problem. Open them in order.
The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.
Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."
With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.
For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."
means testing kills the usefulness of these kinds of stimuli. I completely disagree with your point here and the people buying Gucci/LV are a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Wal-Mart's yearly wage theft statistics.
There is no simple means of identifying who is in need and if people get the help who don't need it they can redistribute it if they are morally inclined or do hoarding or w/e; who cares?
I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met.
Everyone should care. The national debt and eventually the nation will crumble based on these decisions to just print massive amounts of money with no real need.
I didn’t qualify for any stimulus after that one in 2001 so they are filtering it down and putting up some guardrails. They just need to give this some intent and pre thought. You can claim it’s too difficult when you didn’t even try to have a plan or come up with something that was actually going to good use to assist those in need.
Another way to think about it, if Covid was more severe than it was, we’d have wanted those payments to continue for twice or more longer to those in need. But if we were tapped out and had to stop them early, then those in need ultimately succumb to whatever and all the money was spent in vain.
I personally believe we shouldn’t socialize every blip. We are just perpetuating this “who cares” mentality and a welfare mentality. Why even have savings or an emergency fund, the government should step in at every turn. It’s a ridiculous stance in my view.
On the contrary, all public experience shows the opposite. The administrative costs of actually checking if only the right people are receiving a benefit very quickly start out weighing the cost of just paying everyone - especially if you don't want to make the process very onerous for the people who need it (and thus ensure that many who are entitled will not actually be able to receive this).
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, nobody expects perfect checks but at least some sanity is much better than nothing. Also, it makes it much harder to shoot down by opponents rather than blanket money hose.
Now imagine you're homeless. You don't apply for assistance.
We "printed" a lot of money to stop the economy from seizing - the opposite problem - but kept going past what everyone was calling a "soft landing":
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Inflation hit pretty bad as a result:
OTOH, there was a lot of pain iny the subsequent expansion leading up to the 2008 , but that was all the fault of fiscal (eepecially tax) policy of the Bush Administration and thei Congressional allies, not Fed monetary policy. While Greenspan clearly ideologically supported the people doing that, it wasn't him and the Fed causing the problems.
We deserve what we get if we don't act on the obvious pattern, at this point. We've spent half a century throwing the public under the bus just so that a few oligarchs don't have to pay out for their bad bets, and Greenspan was absolutely their man for a significant portion of that campaign in the class wars.
It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.
It described the dotcom bubble, but I seem to recall people were applying it to the 2000s housing market too. Tldr it was not a totally uncommon opinion during either of these bubbles to say there was a bubble going on.
From a person in his position the baseline is "more foresight than just about everyone else". That's why they get the big bucks.
If you build something grand on wooden legs and massive debt for the next guy to deal with, or drive into a failure mode even if that's not super obvious, it's not high praise.
Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technological progress.
The argument that prices can't get cheaper or [bad thing will happen] was never very convincing to me. Prices already do get cheaper for large swaths of the economy that have technological progress grow faster than money supply. Cell phones are rapidly depreciating. You can wait 6m to a year and get a significant discount on the latest iPhone version. People don't stop buying iPhones, and Apple doesn't stop investing in iPhones. This is even more true w/ AI models. Investors/companies are burning billions to build tech that will only get cheaper and obsolete in years if not months.
So if you were to try to convince me that deflation would reduce investment or spending, tell me why this doesn't apply to tech products that get cheaper every year.
Does that include the price of labour? Are you okay with your salary going down? Because the historical record shows that's what happens during deflationary periods: producers of good/services see the price that they can sell things for goes down, and so they insist on their suppliers and inputs—including labour input—reduce their prices as well.
Again, tie it to things that decrease in price over time.
Gimme all the gold contacts in all of your electronics please, we shouldn't be using gold for those I guess....
Also - I think if you look at the data you’ll find periods off the gold standard where food prices grew more slowly than inflation and even wages, ie food becomes cheaper. 80s and 90s for example.
That world results in a lot of people individually deciding "why buy now, when I can buy for less later" and sitting on their money.
That in aggregate makes the economy much worse.
You're up against human nature here. Money may be an arbitrary numerical denomination of value, but people's behavior around it and how that affects the economy at large need to be accounted for. Having prices slowly creep upwards over time (low inflation) tends to result in more, better things sooner.
Does it really? A lot of our problems seem to stem from conspicuous consumption. People will still need things (food shelter clothing) and that will motivate purchasing. "Oh n0es people won't buy flavor of the month consumer garbage, what ever will we do" just doesn't track.
Why do people buy iPhones today knowing that they can get a significant discount in 6-12m for that same iPhone
It has gotten cheaper, as a percentage of people's income and spending.
Because a lot of people earn their living by producing or selling food. Your other necessities don't become more affordable just because food prices go down, but if that's your livelihood it becomes at risk. Food was incredibly cheap during the great depression. There's an amazing quote from the PBS documentary series on it; "A sack of flour cost a nickel, but where were you gonna get a nickel?". Steady, controlled inflation via fiat is the only way to keep a capitalistic economy functioning, because you can't micromanage or control the price of everything, and people need money to live. The real issue is stagnation of wage growth while assets explode. It's the transfer of real wealth from earners to owners that has put us in the current position, not absolute prices.
At the height of the Great Depression (1936), some economists proposed The Chicago Plan to separate the provision of credit from the money supply by eliminating fractional reserve banking, giving better control of the increases and contractions of credit, the elimination of bank runs, and a dramatic reduction in debt. There was a recent (2012) paper from the IMF [1] that seemed to find this actually is pretty sensible, although I do not claim to be smart enough to understand all of the implications.
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2016/12/31/the...
- spending cuts
- stopping fraud
- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars
- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster.
It's not going to be fun.
https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora...
This is really ambiguous:
"- stopping fraud"
And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people.
I find this to be mostly a distraction:
"- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars"
We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US.
This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings:
"- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs"
I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.
The federal budget over time...
2026 - $7.5 trillion
2020 - $4.8 trillion
2015 - $3.9 trillion
2010 - $3.7 trillion
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND
We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal government shouldn't be able to operate on a budget equivalent of about $4 trillion which was just about the average from 2010-2020. There seems to be quite a lot available to cut.
Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments.
A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020.
Then there is healthcare spending, which can be expected to grow faster than inflation, as the population is growing older.
The US is basically running into the same issues as European welfare states. While government spending remains qualitatively the same, demographic changes make it grow faster than tax revenue. Those who couldn't maintain a balanced budget in the past are finding the situation particularly difficult. In some sense, the situation is even worse in the US. Healthcare (old age spending) is particularly expensive, while individuals have greater responsibility for childhood expenses.
The benefits agencies that make up the bulk of the spending have very low overhead and are run very efficiently. The vast majority of funds go directly to beneficiaries.
Balancing the budget will require massive cuts to very popular programs.
Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
> Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days.
Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time.
Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?
a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government.
Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.
No reports have substantiated this talking point to my knowledge.
For inflation to have an impact on the US debt, it has to be approaching the level at which the US debt is increasing. In the last year, the US debt increased by 7.6%, much higher than inflation.
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...
Hmm.... I found this, I wonder if there is any way this line item in the budget could be reduced, it looks sort of big:
https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...
The only branch of government I have faith in at the moment is the bond market.
Pentagon fails financial audit for 8th year in a row - https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12... - December 19th, 2025
Fact Check: Has the Pentagon failed its 7th audit in a row? - https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-... - December 20th, 2024
Thoughts From the Bond Vigilantes - https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-... - December 9th, 2024
Maybe the ENTIRE defense budget would cover it.
(for comparison, the DoD consumes ~$1T of spending, and debt interest costs ~$867B, annually as of this comment)
Citations:
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-medicare-cost-the...
https://www.citizen.org/news/fact-check-medicare-for-all-wou...
https://www.crfb.org/papers/choices-financing-medicare-all
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3106.html
https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/fiscal-policy/mon...
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/interest-expense-avg-interes...
So the entire defense budget would not cover it.
The average federal budget from 2010 to 2020 was $4 trillion. This year it is $7.5 trillion. There's quite a lot to cut.
> The US government spent $6.2 trillion in total in 2023, with $1.7 trillion on discretionary spending, $3.8 trillion on mandatory spending, and $659 billion on net interest. Discretionary spending includes funding for defense, education, transportation, and scientific research. Approximately half of federal discretionary spending is allocated to defense.
So I suppose I would agree with your assertion that there is a lot to cut if we're talking about cutting defense spending and interest on the debt via more taxes to pay down the debt (to reduce forward debt servicing obligations). Can't keep cutting taxes for the wealthy with the expectation that is going to reduce spending or increase overall federal tax income, as the evidence shows it will not.
2024 - $6.8 trillion in spending
$1.3 trillion Defense, $323 billion of which is veteran support (pensions, retirement, medicare, etc).
Discretionary spending is a misnomer that assumes all of the other spending levels just have to be maintained as is, are without fraud, run efficiently and impossible to reform.
Cut 20% across the board from every agency for starters (including Defense). That gets us back from $7.5 trillion to $6 trillion. Then do it again 2 years later and get us back to $4.8 trillion. Then do it again.
States have limited budgets and must balance it all the time. Companies as well. There's no reason the federal government cannot do exactly the same thing.
"Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago and this idea of raising taxes more on those people wouldn't even begin to address the spending problem.
We disagree on the fundamental problem, and I believe your solution is wildly irresponsible to "just keep cutting 20%." You say fraud; prove the fraud. DOGE couldn't find any, so "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Fraud has a very clear definition versus "spending I do not like or approve of."
The $21.7 Billion Blunder: New PSI Report Reveals Billions in Taxpayer Dollars Squandered by DOGE - https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/... - July 21st, 2025 (Report [pdf]: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025-07-31-M...)
The reality of DOGE's mediocre savings - https://fordschool.umich.edu/news/2025/reality-doges-mediocr... - February 25th, 2025
DOGE and “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse” - https://www.cato.org/blog/doge-waste-fraud-abuse - February 20th, 2025
> "Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago and this idea of raising taxes more on those people wouldn't even begin to address the spending problem.
I mean, this is the government they created over decades, including influencing elections through dark money spending, and they have all the wealth. Tax cuts for the wealthy are a material component of the debt the US carries today. Where else would we get it from? More tax and spending cuts? This is very unlikely, feel free to confirm with an NGO like USAFacts or Brookings on the topic.
How four decades of tax cuts fueled inequality - https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/t... - November 29th, 2022
Popular support is very high for taxing the wealthy more, ~80% as of this comment in some cases.
Most Americans continue to favor raising taxes on corporations, higher-income households - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-amer... - March 19th, 2025
But... They did. Who do you think wanted Trump's tax cuts on wealthy businesses?
Who do you think pushed for Reagan's tax cuts on wealthy businesses while also drastically increasing defense spending?
Who do you think still is pushing reduced taxes for wealthy businesses?
"We've cut all taxes from the wealthy and the tax number keeps going down, what can we possibly do?"
That’s why stocks go up, spending goes up and the asset class gets richer. When you peg these to an arbitrary “value” you can see, companies aren’t getting trillions of dollars more efficient, the government isn’t delivering more services and the utility of a business or property hasn’t increased.
That's because it permanently cripples economies by creating an artificial constraint and pretending it's useful. All it does is create another speculation market in gold and cripple credit markets.
It's worth reading all of them, even if you disagree with most of it.
As I understand it, all the gold that has ever been mined would fit in a cube the size of a baseball diamond.
https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-lesson-on-go...
Nixon was responsible for ending the silver standard.
https://www.usmoneyreserve.com/news/executive-insights/when-...
>near unlimited government credit
Really? How do we get some? And, beyond that, what do YOU think the limits should be on increasing the money supply by a sovereign nation?
A nation becomes wealthy by producing things to sell. Nothing else matters, including debt. But, we live in a world where people want to be rich, but also don't want to use resources, or build, or manufacture things, or run an empire. It's contradictory, and we are starting to see the effects.
I don't understand why people keep banging about the theoretical advantaged of a gold standard whan it was the default monetary system for centuries and we have firsthand evidence of the problems it causes (and certainly not more equality in the world!). It has been tried by the whole Earth during several generations.
If you think, like Greenspan and others, that there ought to be a mechanism to force some monetary restraint on governments, try to think of a new mechanism, because the "old way" wasn't better. We know it. Move on.
Don’t worry, wealthy drug addict pedophiles in Silicon Valley are carrying that torch now.
Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman Through Prosperity and Crisis, Dies at 100
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/us/alan-greenspan-dead.ht...
Why did the cost of living decrease in the 90s but not today? What was different then vs now? Well, after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, the US hasn't followed macroeconomic principles (the main principle being to raise interest rates during increased production to prevent inflation), examine the flip after 2000:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-clarida-085777125_wea...
Breadcrumbs:
https://financialpost.com/news/alan-greenspan-dies-at-100 (alternative article)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19990... (example speech)
https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/swe/200... (analysis pdf)
Note that policy had a greater effect on US economic decline than who the Fed chair was. Specifically, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which reversed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies) allowed investors to gamble with our savings again like before the Great Depression:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act
The Housing Bubble popped less than a decade later in 2008.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated the information economy, cementing the duopolies we see today, although the fallout from that arguably wasn't felt until after the arrival of fast mobile internet that coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which contributed to the high communications prices we pay today vs the rest of the world (imposing a kind of privatized tax on the information economy):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
What I saw then was the last hurrah of US colonialism, which patterned itself off of England but used proxy wars instead of direct colonization. Loosely, keeping Asia down supported western antisocialist goals while simultaneously bolstering capitalist economies. In other words, buying shoes for $5 and selling them for $100 (times everything) allowed the US to transition from blue collar to white collar work.
That resulted in the US closing 100,000 factories under the GW Bush administration of the 2000s. And also outsourcing to China and India, the reduction of pure R&D to almost nothing, massive investment in McMansions and SUVs instead of something like renewable energy, and of course diverting perhaps $3 trillion or more to forever wars in the Middle East to prop up the declining industrial economy which depends on fossil fuels.
That's all changing now as China's buying power is passing that of the US:
https://www.capitaleconomics.com/blog/china-versus-us-size-s...
They don't want to make our stuff for pennies on the dollar anymore, and the US can't carry its own weight without massive reeducation and retooling.
But since the US wasted $40 trillion on its national debt instead of investing in the 21st century economy we thought we are going to get in the 90s, we now see prices increasing in parity with wages. In other words, nearly all excess labor productivity goes towards paying the debt ran up by the previous generation. Thomas Jefferson warned against this:
https://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/develop/jefferson.ht...
The young are paying the elderly's retirement while being told to eat less avocado toast.
The reason I'm writing this is that the powers that be will try to tell you that we need to cut government spending and taxes to outrun our economic decline. But if you understand everything I just wrote, then you'll see that the damage of 40 years of trickle-down economics and austerity has already been done.
The way out of this is self-evidently to try new approaches favored by the youth who are doing the work but not seeing the benefits like previous generations did. We're living in a second Gilded Age dominated by wage slavery and high wealth inequality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
The way we overcame that was to do the opposite of everything you see the establishment promoting today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
The low-hanging fruit is getting money out of politics (reversing the Citizens United decision), closing the revolving door between the government and lobbyists, antitrust enforcement, and other popular goals.
But real progress looks like FDR-style New Deal taxation on the ultra-wealthy to pay down the public debt, forgiveness of private debts incurred by artificially inflated costs (jubilee) and public funding of the commons (education, healthcare, the energy and communications grids, anything that results in natural monopolies).
Greenspan wouldn't have liked what I just wrote at the end there. But he would have supported the ending of intergenerational debt IMHO. That's why I think it makes a good target for today's youth, when they need a litmus test for deciding whether voting for a proposed policy is in their best interest.
I've always wondered if part of the 2008 bust was a psyop from his Ayn Rand beliefs.
It probably wasn't as damaging to the world as the Friedman doctrine but it was pretty darn close.