The United States government spends money, you know that.
It spends money on the Defense Department.
It spends money on Ukraine.
It spends money on Social Security checks and a whole host of other things.
How does it get that money?
Answer: It taxes. It taxes
corporations and the rich on the one hand,
and the mass of people on the other.
But often it faces the following
weird quality of our political system.
Corporations and the rich, like the mass of us,
want the government to do things for us.
Government helps corporattions in a hundred different ways.
Government serves us in a hundred different ways.
So we get service. They get service.
They don't want to pay taxes. We don't either.
They are much better at getting out of taxes than we are.
So we kind of get stuck with taxes.
They have, as I've told you many times, all kinds of ways
to minimize, to avoid taxes altogether.
What happens if the government can't tax
but the government is demanded to provide services?
What do our politicians do when the corporations want services
and the rich want services
and the rest of us want services, but none of us wants to pay taxes.
The politicians could stand up and explain how this doesn't work.
But they don't.
We don't have courageous politicians.
We have the other kind.
And, you know what they've done?
They've solved the problem by borrowing.
That's right.
If you don't tax people,
but you don't want to cut back the services they want, it
you want to please them by giving services and please them by not taxing,
the solution is to borrow the money
and to grow it and to borrow more and more.
The accumulation of debts of our government
means that our United States government today owes (get ready),
“national debt” it's called, $32 trillion.
The total output of goods and services in the United States
each year now is $22 trillion.
Our debt as a nation is more than the total output
of goods and services in any year.
That's how fat it's become.
But here's the worst part, friends.
Who do you think the government borrows from?
When the politicians solve their awkward problem by borrowing,
they go back to the rich and the corporations
and they borrow it from them.
If you think you don't understand it, let me do it again.
Corporations and the rich are very good
at getting out of paying taxes.
So if the government's going to meet everyone's need for services,
it has to borrow.
You know who it borrows from corporations and the rich.
They end up giving their money to the government,
not as taxes, end of story,
but instead as a loan which the government
has to pay back to them, plus interest
every year while the debt sits there.
That's why corporations and the rich, after giving lip service to the debt
and we shouldn't grow the debt, are secretly very happy.
They're making money instead of paying taxes.
That's a simple, easy choice, isn't it?
Too bad the mass of American people don't have that choice
because we don't lend to the government, because we don't have the money.
Oh, that's the real story behind the theater.
Many times we've bumped up against the debt ceiling.
Every time we've just raised the ceiling, that's what will happen this time.
Meanwhile, it’s theater in which our politicians try very hard
not to explain to the rest of us what is going on here.
It's a very simple hustle.
No more, no less.