The U.S. federal budget deficit jumped 26% in November from a year earlier to $314 billion, a record for the month and the highest since March, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday, driven by sharply higher interest costs and other outlays.

Federal revenues in November rose $23 billion to $275 billion, a 9% increase from a year earlier.

Outlays jumped $88 billion to $589 billion, 18% higher than a year earlier. Interest payments on U.S. government debt accounted for $25 billion of the increase.

The outlay for interest on the debt in November, at $80 billion, surpassed the $66 billion outlay for national defense, which was up $8 billion from a year earlier. The outlay for the government-run Medicare health insurance program also rose by $8 billion, to $93 billion, while the outlay for the government-run Medicaid program for the poor and disabled climbed $2 billion to $50 billion.

TFW your interest payments approach medicare spending

The weighted average interest rate on the $26 trillion of outstanding Treasury securities rose to 3.10% last month from 2.22% in November of last year.

Seems nice in pflp-octoplushie sense, if fed won't drop interest rates in the next year, libertarian bugbear about deficits will come closer to fruition

  • Kaplya
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is not correct. You are confusing two separate things: monetary sovereignty and dollar hegemony.

    The dollar hegemony simply allows the US to get “free lunches” all over the world because everyone wants dollar and the Fed can always print the money needed to get those free lunches. The treasury bonds serve to absorb the dollar surplus the US spent overseas and recycle them back to the US.

    This is very different from monetary sovereignty, in which a country’s currency is not tied to any form of metal/resource or pegged to another currency, in other words, fiat currency. Here, the state in charge of money creation can always print as much money as is needed to drive economic growth so long as they are not limited by the availability of labor, resources and technology. For example, if you already have 100% employment rate, of course you cannot create more jobs (more money), and this will lead to inflation because there is not enough productive capacity to fulfill the excess demand.

    The reason most other countries cannot do this is because they lack energy and food sovereignty. This is part of the post-war US imperialism in which through the creation of IMF, World Bank, IMF and various global financial institutions had severed the ability of most developing countries to grow their own food, nationalize their own natural resources including energy, and are forced to orientate their economies toward export crops to serve first world consumerism, while allowing foreign corporations to enter and destroy their domestic industries.

    People always get confused by these two concepts. Hope this clears them up.