If you aren’t worried about America’s debt, you should be, and you’ve got 35 trillion reasons to be so concerned. That’s 35 trillion – a “t” followed by a “rillion.” That’s a lot of money and a lot of debt, and it’s leading Elon Musk to point out that America is going bankrupt.
Billionaire Elon Musk warned Monday that the United States is on the fast track to defaulting on its debt, which continues to accelerate after topping a record $35 trillion just weeks ago.
During a sit-down at the All-In Podcast’s All-In Summit 2024 event, Musk was asked about his plan for a government efficiency commission, which he has agreed to lead if former President Trump wins a second term in the White House.
“If Trump wins – and obviously, I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen – we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government,” Musk said. “Because the other thing besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly, and… everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.”
Will we, though? Somehow whistling past the graveyard just doesn’t seem to cover the casual disregard with which everyone in Washington and many elsewhere have treated this issue. Every administration since World War II has added to the debt, and in about the last decade, it has exploded out of control. Musk is concerned that America is going bankrupt, but he’s wrong; his use of the future tense is inaccurate and inadequate. America already is broke, and it’s hard to see a way out of it.
“We’re adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow,” he said, noting that the interest payments are rising rapidly, so eventually “the only thing we’ll be able to pay is interest.”
“It’s just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt,” Musk said. “This does not have a good ending, and so we have to reduce the spending.”
Reducing spending would help, but to be effective, it would have to be far more than the usual proposed reductions in the rate of increase that cause Congressional Democrats to clutch at pearls and look around for the nearest fainting couch. If anyone is to get the imperial federal Colussus under control, it will take someone who can go in swinging, not a rapier but a meat axe. Argentina’s Javier Milei has shown us the way – cuts, cuts, and more cuts. Eliminate entire Cabinet-level departments.
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This is a financial crisis, but we must acknowledge that this is also an existential crisis. The very survival of our nation may well be at stake. As I’ve written in the past, there are three ways out of this mess:
- We can grow our way out of it, and we may well be past the point of no return there.
- We can inflate our way out of it, which means plunging the nation into a Zimbabwean inflation crisis.
- We can repudiate our debt, throwing the world into a global depression and likely ending the United States’ primary role in geopolitics.
Elon Musk is right to be concerned. I worry that he’s not concerned enough.
If only there were some kind of written guideline that provided details on what the scope of the federal government is supposed to be limited to.
