At CPAC this weekend, Mike Pompeo adopted the role of extreme federal debt hysteria, even willing to complain of the $8 trillion in debt added by the Trump administration:
This is a more bipartisan move on the debt than GOP colleagues who pretend the debt magically appeared in the last two years of the Biden administration, but it is in service of the corporate-driven debt fear mongering that pretends we as a nation are drowning in debt.
We aren’t.
That $8 trillion figure sounds scary if we don’t recognize that the total wealth held by US households is over $143 trillion.
And the wealth of the top 1% alone is roughly $45 trillion- significantly more than the whole national debt of $30 trillion.
What is notable is that over the last three decades, growth In the wealth of that top1% has outpaced growth in the federal debt.
While the federal debt has been growing, the wealth of the richest 1% has been growing to heights never before seen in our nation.
If you want to understand the anti-debt hysteria of the billionaire-funded GOP leadership, it is the fear that the American people will notice this so they want to keep the focus on cutting spending rather than the more attractive option of taxing that growing outsize wealth of the superrich.