For paid subscribers only as the Edsel of administrations tries to do basic math.

I’ve got a big number for you today, kittens, fresh from the front lines of the Edsel of administrations as we have set a new record in this Parliament of whores; in this case, it’s the national debt.

$40 trillion dollars.

To give that some perspective, one trillion seconds is nearly 32,000 years. The Republican Joint Economic Committee estimates that’s $88,915.34 PER SECOND in 2026. We pay $1 trillion in interest every year, too. The debt has increased by $1 trillion in six months. That $1 trillion could go to paying down the debt, like it’s a very high-limit credit card, or paying for essential programs like food stamps, healthcare, infrastructure, public services, Social Security, FEMA, and all that socialist nonsense.

But no worries, says Wedgie Please (SecTreas Scott Bessent). In his characteristic fumbling way, complete with wavering voice and shaking hands and rocking a tan suit, he told reporters yesterday that “The forty trillion, uh, it’s a big number, it is, it is smaller when we look at the, um, publicly traded amount because our social security funds and other government entities hold a substantial amount.”

No, I have no idea what he’s talking about and it was very obvious that he didn’t either. Intra-governmental debt, publicly traded debt: It’s all debt and you and are paying the interest on it. According to a chart from the Treasury department, intragovernmental debt is only $7.73 trillion and the “publicly traded” debt is at $32.05 trillion. $32 trillion isn’t much better than $40 trillion.

Intragovernmental debt is stuff like money that it owes to its own agencies and trust funds. Military retirement funds, social security, Medicare, etc.

Publicly traded debt is things like bonds; they’re issued to the public and traded on open markets. Mutual funds, state and local government bonds, savings bonds, etc. 29%, or $9.3 trillion of this debt is owned by foreign governments and investors; US Treasuries are considered one of the safest investments out there and they’re very liquid plus the dollar is the world currency. However, that opinion is starting to change. Some of the foreign investors: Japan, UK, China, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, India, Brazil, France, Taiwan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Belgium, and others. Note that Trump is setting out to piss off quite a few of them. If they called in the debt, we’d be fucked but so would they. Still, you should be aware that there’s a movement out there to get away from the dollar as the global currency, and our President isn’t helping to mitigate that one bit.

You’ll remember that one of the many things our President (well, every President) campaigned on was reducing the debt. What’s Wedgie Please got to say about that? Blaming Biden in 3… 2… 1.

Dig: “And remember, we did not get here at a day, that we were left with a mess, the Biden administration had the highest deficit to GDP [gross domestic product] in history, when we weren’t at war, or weren’t in a recession.” Note that the deficit is not the debt and the Secretary of the Treasury really should know the difference.