My high school history teacher, back in 1989, asked our class to name the single biggest problem facing the United States. We wrote our answers anonymously, and he tallied the results. When he read mine aloud — “the federal government’s debt” — he rolled his eyes, as if I’d said something idiotic.
I didn’t name debt nearly 40 years ago just because I think borrowing is bad. I named it because elected officials were already pretending deficit spending wasn’t a problem — and because no one seemed willing to hold the government accountable for it.
The more the Fed prints, the weaker the dollar becomes. The weaker the dollar becomes, the more the world doubts it.
Almost four decades on, nothing has changed. The problem has only grown — as every neglected problem does.
In 1989, the budget deficit was $153 billion. The total national debt stood at $2.86 trillion.
By 2024, the annual deficit had exploded to $1.8 trillion, and the total debt hit $35 trillion. Interest payments now consume 3% of GDP, and they’re still climbing. Meanwhile, the country faces $210 trillion in unfunded liabilities, mostly Social Security and Medicare.
The United States is broke. And Americans act as if it doesn’t matter.
The federal government has been shut down for three weeks. Republicans want to keep spending at ruinous levels. Democrats want to spend even more ruinously. Both sides ignore the obvious: We’re bankrupt. And nobody in America seems to care.
Congress hasn’t passed a real budget since 1996. For nearly 30 years, lawmakers have funded everything through “continuing resolutions,” which automatically renew old spending and add new layers on top. Every “temporary” increase becomes permanent.
The 2009 “one-time” $831 billion stimulus? Still baked in. The $4.6 trillion COVID “relief” binge? Never rolled back. Dozens of other “emergency” expenditures have quietly become fixtures of federal spending.
Year after year, Washington keeps the faucet open — and the debt grows.
By 2024, U.S. GDP was $29.2 trillion. Federal debt was $35 trillion. That’s a debt-to-GDP ratio of 123%. And Washington keeps spending as if it can print reality.
No one in America seems to care.
The rest of the world is starting to notice.
To fund its deficits, the U.S. Treasury sells bonds — IOUs that investors buy with the promise of repayment plus interest. Lately, those auctions have gone poorly. The world’s appetite for American debt is fading.
As one financial analysis put it: “Given the poor state of the American fiscal situation, auctions will likely remain large for the foreseeable future. The risk that markets will push back is rising.”
Another report warned that persistent $2 trillion deficits during peacetime raise “important questions about what might happen during a recession or war.”
When investors balk, the Federal Reserve steps in, printing money to buy the debt. That fuels inflation — the same inflation that has already stripped 87% of the dollar’s value since we abandoned the gold standard in 1971.
The more the Fed prints, the weaker the dollar becomes. The weaker the dollar becomes, the more the world doubts it.
The only thing still propping up the dollar is its role as the world’s reserve currency — the global default for trade and central bank holdings since 1944. That status lets America keep spending money it doesn’t have. But the illusion can’t last forever.
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The BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — are challenging the dollar’s dominance. They’ve added members such as Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest oil producer, has been invited to join. At least 40 other nations are lining up.
As Business Insider put it, “BRICS is consolidating its global power and influence. This should be a key cause of concern for the U.S., as new members could amplify de-dollarization.”
So what has Washington done? Cut spending? Tighten the money supply? Restore fiscal sanity? Of course not.
Instead, the government rattles sabers. President Donald Trump recently threatened a 100% tariff on the BRICS bloc countries if they move to undermine the dollar — as if bluster could paper over decades of reckless spending.
The United States is broke but still pretending otherwise. Washington spends like a drunk who keeps ordering drinks on a canceled credit card. The world is beginning to call the bluff.
And the American people? They’re still sleepwalking — as they have been for decades.
Debate over Donald Trump’s tariff doctrine has turned toxic for one simple reason: Critics keep mistaking the tool for the target. The tariffs aren’t the policy. They’re the lever.
The real goal is to dismantle anti-competitive market distortions, which have strangled global growth for decades. According to a recent paper from the Growth Commission, which I chair, roughly 80% of the world’s economic drag from trade barriers doesn’t come from tariffs at all. It comes from domestic distortions that tilt markets toward protected incumbents and away from new entrants.
Trump’s trade doctrine is not a rejection of free trade. It’s a correction.
If Trump’s doctrine succeeds in forcing other nations to roll back those distortions, U.S. tariffs will fall — and global growth will surge.
What counts as an ACMD? The test is simple and pro-market: Does a policy block voluntary exchange and weaken efficiency? If it does, it’s distortionary.
These distortions take many forms: subsidies that protect national champions, licensing rules that freeze out competition, or “harmonization” regulations that entrench advantage under the guise of fairness. We propose a clear diagnostic: measure the GDP loss per capita caused by these distortions. We found three pillars that predict income performance: international competition, domestic competition, and property rights.
The results are striking. A one-point gain in domestic competition correlates with an 11.2% rise in GDP per capita. Strengthening property rights adds about 7%, and boosting international competition adds roughly 4%.
The conclusion is obvious: the fastest path to prosperity isn’t another tariff round. It’s aggressive pro-competition reform.
The failure of the modern trading system didn’t come from liberalizing at the border — it came from stopping there.
Since the 1990s, global institutions have trimmed tariffs but tolerated an explosion of industrial policy, subsidies, and regulatory frameworks that quietly cripple competition.
Look at the U.S. trade representative’s annual National Trade Estimate report. The latest edition runs 397 pages cataloging barriers to global growth. Fully 80% aren’t tariffs. They are behind-the-border distortions — ACMDs — doing the real damage.
Trump’s trade doctrine is not a rejection of free trade. It’s a correction. It uses America’s market access as leverage: Reduce your distortions and our tariffs go down. Refuse and face penalties. The measure of success isn’t political theater — it’s income growth. How much GDP per capita can be restored by real reform? That’s the metric that aligns incentives at home and abroad.
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Future deals should include an ACMD chapter requiring competitive neutrality, limits on subsidies, and mutual recognition between trading partners. This turns tariff negotiations into something productive: a race to open markets, not close them.
The doctrine also turns inward. The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to identify and eliminate domestic rules that block competition. That matters both for credibility and growth. If America expects others to reduce distortions, it must show the same resolve at home — in health care, licensing, and sectors riddled with protectionist rules.
Business leaders should treat this as a once-in-a-generation opening. First, expose distortions. Identify anti-competitive market distortions and report them to the U.S. trade representative.
Second, de-risk supply chains. Avoid jurisdictions that refuse to reform. Tariffs will make them unviable.
Third, coordinate with allies. Work with like-minded firms to propose reforms where tariff relief can follow.
The incentive is powerful: Reform your markets, gain access to ours.
Reducing market distortions isn’t just about economics. Ultimately, it’s about power. State-backed distortions — especially in economies built around state-owned enterprises — fuel geopolitical coercion. They channel wealth into non-market dominance. Linking market access to ACMD reduction forms a “coalition of the willing” that ties prosperity to liberty.
Critics call tariffs blunt instruments. They’re right. But they may be the only tools sharp enough to cut through the web of distortions that standard trade talks have ignored for 30 years. If America can use its market power to unlock true competition abroad while cleaning up its own regulatory excess at home, the result will be stronger wages, higher productivity, and renewed global leadership.
That’s the promise of the Trump doctrine — not a wall of tariffs, but a bridge to freer markets and faster growth.
President Donald Trump's threats of new tariffs continued this week. Among his targets was one that he has set his sights on before: the movie industry.
On Monday, the president took to Truth Social to threaten tariffs on the movie industry, saying that movie-making has been "stolen" by foreign producers.
'California, with its weak and incompetent Governor, has been particularly hard hit!'
"Our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing 'candy from a baby.'"
President Trump singled out California and its governor, Gavin Newsom (D), in his post.
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"California, with its weak and incompetent Governor, has been particularly hard hit! Therefore, in order to solve this long time, never ending problem, I will be imposing a 100% Tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter."
Trump did not specify when these tariffs will take effect or how the tariff would be levied. Critics have pointed out that this is essentially the first time the Trump administration is attempting to impose a tariff on a service rather than a good.
This announcement is a renewal of a tariff threat on the industry that Trump made in May.
“On first blush, it’s shocking and would represent a virtually complete halt of production,” one industry insider told CNN in May. “But in reality, he has no jurisdiction to do this, and it’s too complex to enforce.”
Trump's ability to levy tariffs has recently been challenged. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments challenging Trump's tariffs on November 5.
In a separate post, Trump also announced that his administration plans to impose "substantial tariffs" on the furniture-making industry, pointing to the devastation of North Carolina's industry by foreign manufacturers.
Blaze News reached out to the White House but did not receive a response by publishing time.
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For months, Americans were warned by the media about a global economic trade war that would begin in the wake of President Trump’s tariffs — but it hasn’t happened.
“All the fearmongering was totally wrong,” the Heartland Institute’s Justin T. Haskins tells BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler on “The Liz Wheeler Show.” “It was just totally and completely wrong.”
“As of right now, the data that we have clearly shows that the tariffs that have gone into effect have not dramatically increased prices for consumers. We obviously are not in the midst of an economic catastrophe or something like that,” he continues.
Haskins also points out that “revenues are up” and “tax revenues are up.”
“That’s a good thing because we have a gigantic deficit problem in this country and a gigantic government debt problem long-term, and this could be a potential solution to that,” he explains, though he notes that the mainstream media is not reporting any of the good.
“If you just were to Google this story and look around the internet, you’ll see people say that the tariffs are causing lots of inflation. You’ll see it in headlines all over the place, and I just want to give real data from the government that proves that that’s not the case,” Haskins says.
Haskins points to the CPI inflation rate, which is the standard used for measuring inflation.
“In July, the 12-month inflation rate from July 2024-2025, 2.7%, is basically the same as in June. That’s less than what it was in December and in January before Trump was even president. So at that point it was around 3%,” Haskins explains.
“So the inflation has actually gone down over the past eight months, if you’re just comparing it in that way. If you start looking at individual numbers, parts of the economy prices, CPI prices in specific parts of the economy where you would expect to see tariffs causing inflation, if tariffs do cause inflation, you’re not seeing it,” he says.
One example Haskins uses is with clothing, of which, he explains 97% is not made in the United States.
“We are seeing prices actually go down … so if tariffs are causing inflation, then you would think that would be one area where you’d expect to see prices soaring, and we’re not seeing that.”
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President Donald Trump's efforts to impose tariffs on imports from foreign governments hit a massive stumbling block in the form of a federal appeals court decision on Friday.
The 7-4 ruling of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that the president exceeded his authority when he cited a 1977 emergency powers act to implement many of his tariffs. If upheld, tens of billions of dollars in tariff revenue would have to be returned.
'None of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax.'
The ruling will not take effect until Oct. 14 to allow the administration to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The statute bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax," reads the order from the court.
The ruling applies to those tariffs made under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act but not those passed by the president through other laws.
Trump has said that the billions of dollars of revenue from the tariffs would help balance the budget and erode the massive government debt. He has also used the tariff threat to force companies to bring back manufacturing to the U.S.
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"The tariffs give us great power to negotiate," Trump said in comments from April. "Always have, I've used them very well in the first administration, as you saw, but now we're taking it to a whole new level, because it's a worldwide situation, and it's very exciting to see."
Critics say that the Constitution specifically granted the power of tariffs to Congress and that tariffs usually lead to trade wars, lost jobs, and inflation.
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The universities preaching that America is structurally racist now say they need international students to survive. Sad but true.
President Trump on Monday floated a proposal that has conservatives buzzing. Just before meeting with the president of South Korea, while discussing trade negotiations with China, Trump suggested that the deal might include allowing 600,000 Chinese students to attend American universities.
Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing. Why should taxpayers fund that?
I’ve learned not to sprint ahead of Trump’s negotiations. He often uses public remarks as part of the bargaining table — dangling outrageous possibilities to shove the other side into error. And inconveniently for his critics, it usually works. Still, this one deserves a closer look.
As a professor at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest state school, I see firsthand how fragile higher education has become. Universities increasingly depend on international students to prop up their budgets. They reorient themselves not around local students but around foreign ones, reshaping programs and communications to make sure outsiders feel at home.
ASU boasts 195,000 students. Yet when the semester began, the university’s homepage highlighted international arrivals, not Arizona students. The welcome-back email did the same. Arizona families — the taxpayers who actually fund the place — were treated as an afterthought.
Administrators justify this by pointing to economic contributions, diversity, and talent. But native students notice the slight. Parents notice it too. The message is clear: Tuition dollars matter more than the citizens who built these schools. ASU may call itself the “New American University,” but more often it presents itself as the “No Longer American University.”
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Here’s the truth: Many American universities cannot survive without international tuition checks.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted as much on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, saying the bottom 15% of U.S. colleges would simply shut down without that revenue. Universities have operated like Ponzi schemes, built on the illusion that enrollment growth never ends. But as American students tire of being hectored with radical political agendas, growth slows and the budgets collapse.
The U.S. already hosts about 270,000 Chinese students, not counting tens of thousands more from India, South Korea, and elsewhere. ASU alone has 16,000 international students, down from 18,000 last year. Trump’s proposed deal would more than double the number of Chinese students nationwide overnight.
Even if you grant the economic benefits, the bigger question — maybe the biggest — is: What sort of education would these 600,000 students receive?
We could introduce them to the greatness of the American experiment, the sweep of Western civilization, and the biblical truths that shaped both. We could even present the gospel to hundreds of thousands of students who may never have heard it before. That would be a noble exchange.
But that isn’t what happens on most campuses.
Drop them into a humanities classroom and they’ll be steeped in anti-racism, DEI dogma, LGBTQ activism, “decolonizing the curriculum,” and the thesis that America and the West are irredeemably wicked. Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing — either by turning foreign students into residents who despise their host country or sending them home as ambassadors of contempt.
Why should American taxpayers fund that?
Universities like ASU showcase international students while sidelining their own. They rely on foreign tuition to mask fiscal rot. And in exchange, they sell a curriculum that treats America as racist, the West as evil, and Christianity as oppressive.
No “economic benefit” offsets that catastrophic formula.
If American universities want to survive, they must first clean their own house.
Only then can we discuss whether more international students make sense. Until then, it is rich with irony: The same universities that teach contempt for America now admit they need foreign students to survive.
From challenges to President Trump's tariffs to the longstanding battle over race-based redistricting, the Supreme Court's 2025-2026 term is shaping up to be as exciting as the last.
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