SCOTT BESSENT JUST WENT SUPERNOVA LEVEL FUCKWIT

On Tuesday, somewhere in the bowels of the US Treasury, an odometer quietly rolled over. The official figure, because these pricks are nothing if not precise about the hole they’ve dug, was $40,047,425,768,420.22. Forty trillion dollars of national debt, and yes, they counted the twenty-two cents.

To put the pace in perspective: America crossed $38 trillion last October. It crossed $39 trillion in March. It crossed $40 trillion this week. That’s a trillion dollars of new debt every five months, which is roughly the entire GDP of the Netherlands going on the credit card between school terms. The Congressional Budget Office, the closest thing Washington has to a designated driver, reckoned back in 2023 that America wouldn’t hit this milestone until 2028. They were two years optimistic. On the current trajectory it’s $50 trillion inside six years.

And here’s the milestone inside the milestone: America’s public debt is now bigger than its entire economy for the first time in about eighty years. The record, 106 per cent of GDP, was set in 1946, when the excuse was that they’d just finished paying for the largest war in human history. That record is projected to fall within the next few years. The 1946 debt bought the defeat of actual fascism. What’s the 2026 debt buying? Hold that thought, we’ll get to the Treasury Secretary shortly, and I promise you he’s worse than you’re imagining.

Slowly, then all at once, and always with someone else holding the receipt.

Start with the wars. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the tab for America’s post-9/11 adventures at roughly $8 trillion once you include the decades of veterans’ care still owing. Eight trillion dollars to turn Iraq into a car park and Afghanistan back into the Taliban’s Airbnb. Not a cent of it paid for with a war tax, all of it borrowed, because asking Americans to actually fund a war might have prompted them to ask whether they wanted one.

Then there’s Donald Trump, who in 2016 promised, on camera, hand on his heart or whatever occupies that cavity, that he would eliminate the entire national debt in eight years. The whole thing. Gone. Ten years on from that promise, the ledger says he has personally presided over roughly $11.6 trillion in new debt across his two terms: $7.8 trillion the first go-round via tax cuts for the top end and COVID spending, and about $3.8 trillion and climbing since January 2025. The bloke promised to pay off the mortgage and instead bought a second jet ski.

And the current burn rate has a fresh accelerant: a war with Iran, now nearly six months old, that chewed through an estimated $30 to $45 billion in its first month alone. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget tallies the administration’s defence expansion at $3.2 trillion over the coming decade, in service of a requested $1.5 trillion annual military budget, the largest since the one that beat Hitler. Remember when the MAGA pitch was no more foreign wars? Turns out the fine print said no more foreign wars you get a say in.

Meanwhile, the interest bill alone now runs north of a trillion dollars a year. America spends more servicing its debt than it spends on its entire military, and it has the biggest military on Earth. Every American child is born carrying roughly a $530,000 share of this. Congratulations on the birth of your daughter, here’s her invoice.

Now, whenever you point any of this out, some galah in a red hat will tell you it’s just what governments do, debt is inevitable, nothing to be done. So let me introduce you to a radical socialist by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

So let me introduce you to a radical fucking socialist by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This bloke was a Republican five-star general who ran the entire liberation of Europe, which is to say he had more legitimate tough-guy credentials in his left bollock than the entire current cabinet has managed between them, draft dodgers and podcast warriors the lot of them. And under his presidency, the top marginal tax rate on the highest incomes in America was ninety-one per cent. Say it out loud in front of a modern Republican and watch the cunt burst into flames like you’ve read the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

And what did Ike do with all that money prised from millionaires’ cold sweaty hands? Only built the interstate highway system, the largest public works project in American history, the literal roads these MAGA fuckwits drive their lifted utes down on the way to a rally about how government never built anything. Balanced the federal budget three times while he was at it, a feat the modern GOP treats like alchemy, and still had enough petrol in the tank to spend his farewell address warning the country about the military-industrial complex, the exact fucking machine currently hoovering up borrowed trillions and shitting them out as rubble over the Persian Gulf. The man predicted this entire clusterfuck on his way out the door in 1961 and they gave him a round of applause and did it anyway.

And that’s not ancient history, that’s the same party within living memory. Somewhere between Ike and now, the party of balanced budgets became the party of borrow-and-bomb, run by men who’d sooner eat their own hat than tax a hedge fund, and the bill got quietly slid down the table to your grandkids, who can’t vote yet, which is of course the entire fucking point.

Here’s what does my head in. Eight trillion on wars. Eleven and a half trillion on Trump’s watch. A trillion a year in interest. And the official position of the American right, screamed from every Murdoch-owned orifice, is that the gravest economic threat facing the United States is a Guatemalan roof tiler.

They built a wall to keep out the people mowing their lawns while the people mowing them walked out the front gate with the entire Treasury. It’s the greatest misdirection in political history. Don’t look at the $8 trillion in war debt, look at the fella with the leaf blower. Don’t ask why your hospital bill has a comma in it, ask why the menus have Spanish on them. The elephant isn’t in the room, mate, the elephant IS the room, and they’ve got 77 million people staring out the window at a bloke on a pushbike.

Which brings us, with enormous pleasure, to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. An academic level fuckbrain, and I mean that literally, the man taught economic history at Yale, which makes what you're about to watch less a gaffe and more a resignation letter from the entire field.

First, the CV. Bessent is a hedge fund man, formerly George Soros’s right hand, yes, THAT Soros, the one Newsmax told you controls the weather, with a disclosed personal fortune of at least $521 million and estimates running around $600 million. Not quite a billionaire, which in this administration practically makes him the work-experience kid. This is the man dispatched to explain to Americans juggling three jobs why forty trillion in debt is fine, actually.

On Thursday he fronted the cameras outside the White House, and what came out of his mouth was a Jackson Pollock painted entirely in bullshit. Let’s roll the tape.

Two sentences, two catastrophes. First, the United States Secretary of the Treasury, the nation’s Chief Bond Salesman, expressed confidence that “bonds will continue declining.” Now, we’ll be generous and assume he meant yields declining, which would be good news, rather than bond prices, which have been falling because investors have gone on what CNBC called a buyers’ strike since June. But when your one job is selling bonds and you can’t say the sentence right, one day after your own department announced it would double its emergency buybacks to prop up the market, and while your own advisory committee is warning of a $1.45 trillion funding shortfall in 2027-28, the slip is the story. This is the arsonist reassuring you the smoke is decorative.

Second, and I need you to sit down slowly and pour a stiff glass of whatever the fuck will work for this one: the man steering the world's largest economy announced, on camera, that oil prices spiked 'today' and he doesn't 'really understand' why. Scott. Mate. Your government has been at war in the Persian Gulf for six months. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the planet’s oil travels, has been a shooting gallery since autumn. There are IFLA readers in Muleshoe who could explain this oil spike to you using fridge magnets and a fucking stubby holder.

“The numbers are not the actual numbers.” That is a direct quote from the Treasury Secretary of the United States regarding the national accounts. Not economics, that. That’s what a bloke says when you find receipts in his ute. Try it yourself next time the tax office calls: sorry love, my numbers are not the actual numbers. See how far it gets you, because it apparently gets you fifth in line to the presidency.

His actual argument, buried in this entry level word salad of salmonella, is that the deficit only looks bad because the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s emergency tariffs illegal in February and forced the Treasury to refund billions in illegally collected money. Which produced this all-timer:

Now I've said some incredibly dumb shit in my short stint on this hurtling rock, but fuck me, this bloke's taught me a thing or two about the dangers of leaded paint. And I say that as a man who sprayed the stuff professionally. Read on at your own risk.

So folks, follow the logic, but only if you can survive this masterclass of cataclysmic cluelessness. The government took money it had no legal right to take. The highest court in the land ordered it returned. And Bessent’s position is that giving back the stolen money is “corporate welfare,” because “the American people had that money” while it was sitting in the Treasury. By that reasoning every mugging is a community savings scheme and your wallet was simply enjoying a stint in public ownership. He then admitted, in the same breath, that Treasury has no idea what discounts importers actually negotiated, which is a quiet confession that they’ve never known who was really paying these tariffs, a question you might consider relevant after two years of insisting it was China.

And the grand plan for the forty trillion? Direct quote: “there’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number,” and America will simply “grow our way out of this.” Nothing magic about it. He assessed the largest debt in the history of human civilisation with the enthusiasm of a man reviewing a mid-tier parmy. Growth is the plan the way “she’ll be right” is a structural engineering report.

So America’s broke. Too broke for healthcare, too broke for housing, too broke to keep Social Security whole past 2032. Forty trillion in the red. Which leaves one question hanging over the whole sorry circus, and I put it to camera this week:

SO I ASK THE SIMPLE QUESTION: WHERE’S THE FUCKING CASH?

Short version for the read-only crowd: while America was racking up forty trillion in debt, the richest one per cent were quietly hoovering up, per the Federal Reserve’s own data, about fifty-five trillion in wealth. That’s a record 31.7 per cent share of everything the country owns, roughly equal to what the entire bottom ninety per cent holds combined, while the bottom half of America, more than 160 million actual human beings, gets by on 2.5 per cent, which is less a slice of the pie than a photograph of one.

Now run the thought experiment, and settle down, nobody’s proposing we roll up to the Hamptons with a flatbed and a crowbar: take forty trillion off the top one per cent, wipe the debt to zero, and those poor bastards would still be lounging on fifteen trillion, still three and a half times the entire bottom half of the country. You could rob the richest people in America of more money than has ever been robbed from anyone anywhere, and they’d remain, comfortably, the richest fucking people in America.

And to be scrupulously fair, because that’s the difference between us and the sewage lagoons we’re about to discuss, no, the debt wasn’t literally wired into rich blokes’ accounts. Federal debt and private wealth are separate ledgers, but they’ve been fucking each other senseless through policy for forty years: tax cuts tilted to capital, war contracts, bailouts and asset-price rocket fuel deciding, year after year, who got the gains and who got the bill. So spare me the sermon about America being broke. America is drowning in money. It’s just pooled at one end of the bath, and the blokes soaking in it keep telling the shallow end the water’s run out.

Now, I’m not here to spray 77 million voters. Plenty of them are battlers who got conned, and you don’t blame the mark for the con, you blame the conman. And the con had a broadcast network.

For thirty years, Rupert Murdoch’s empire, Newsmax, and the rest of the right-wing propaganda complex have run the same protection racket: keep the camera on the border, the drag queens, the war on Christmas, anything, ANYTHING, but the ledger. Every hour spent panicking about a caravan of asylum seekers is an hour not spent asking why the top 1 per cent’s pile grew by trillions while your town’s hospital closed. The podcast bros picked up the same script and read it to a generation of young blokes between ads for reflux supplements. None of it is an accident. Fear of the bloke below you is the finest anaesthetic ever developed for the pain of being robbed by the bloke above you, and these outlets are the anaesthetists, and they should be held accountable for every year of it.

But here’s the thing about anaesthetic. It wears off.

Forty trillion in debt. Fifty-five trillion parked at the top. A Treasury Secretary who doesn’t understand oil prices explaining that the numbers aren’t the actual numbers. A trillion a year in interest while nurses ration insulin. This doesn’t hold. Everyone can feel it now, even the people who voted for it, especially the people who voted for it, because they were promised the golden age and got a $530,000 invoice stapled to their newborn.

They keep waiting for the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It ain’t a straw, mate. It’s a 330-foot redwood, and it is coming down tremendously and powerfully fucking hard. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

IFLA ~ Gman

THE AUSSIE-TO-YANK WORD WIZARD: SAME WORD, DIFFERENT HEMISPHERE

Before you dive in, a public safety announcement. Some words exist in both our languages wearing the same outfit and living completely different lives. These are the trap words, the ones that have ended relationships, job interviews and at least one church picnic. Learn them before you speak, because your mouth will not warn you.

battler: The ordinary Australian doing it tough and having a go. The most invoked and least helped person in the country. Every budget speech is dedicated to the battler and every budget is delivered to a bloke with 7 investment properties.

car park: Your parking lot. Also the venue for everything important in Australian life: the fight after the pub, the meeting after the meeting, and the quiet word after the press conference. Also, historically, where American democracy held a pivotal press conference at a landscaping business, so the metaphor travels.

do my head in: To be driven to the edge of sanity by sheer accumulated frustration. Not anger, which is loud and passes. This is the slow grinding kind.

fuckbrain: A brain wired specifically for fucking things up. Distinct from the common fuckwit, who is merely useless: the fuckbrain holds qualifications. The full deployment is “academic level fuckbrain,” reserved for the special case of a man with a Yale teaching post in economic history who cannot explain an oil price during an oil war.

galah: A loud pink-and-grey parrot, and by extension a loud foolish person who makes an enormous racket and achieves precisely nothing. Any resemblance to sitting heads of state is purely ornithological.

parmy: Chicken parmigiana: a crumbed schnitzel drowned in tomato sugo and melted cheese, undisputed monarch of the Australian pub menu. Reviewing a national debt like a mid-tier parmy is the lowest possible level of official concern.

pushbike: A bicycle, the full compound deployed so nobody confuses it with anything running on petrol. The lowest-stakes vehicle a human being can operate, which is precisely why a bloke on one makes the ideal decoy villain for a forty trillion dollar heist.

she’ll be right: The unofficial national motto and the most structurally dangerous phrase in the English language. Means “near enough is good enough, stop fussing.” She is frequently not right.

spray, a: A verbal tirade, a sustained and colourful telling-off. To “give someone a spray” is to unload on them at volume. An entire IFLA article is, in strict technical terms, a spray with citations.

stubby holder: What Americans call a koozie, which is a word we refuse to say out loud. The neoprene sleeve that keeps a stubbie cold and your hand dry. Load-bearing item of national infrastructure.

ute: A utility vehicle. Your pickup, more or less, though a true ute has a tray and a dog in it. Finding receipts in a man’s ute is the Australian standard of undeniable evidence.

work-experience kid: The Australian intern. The teenager sent to a workplace for a week to photocopy things, break the good stapler, and get dispatched to the shed for a left-handed screwdriver. To call a US cabinet secretary the work-experience kid is to observe that a mere half a billion dollars makes him the poorest bloke in the building.

CHOPPER - CLIP - NEVILLE BARTOS NO CASH HERE