It's what was said earlier, the influx of cash from tax season. Or perhaps just an anomaly in when government outlays are paid. Whatever. It was 55 billion last January.

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsre...mt/mts0116.pdf

The orange human filth literally gets all his information from watching tv. Does he learn anything from briefings? Do they even have them in his White House?

Even ones where the email is '****youyou****ing****@****off.com'?

Regarding the debt ceiling:

This is the link posted by David Frum:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/de...1&endYear=2017

You see 2 types of debt, to the public and intragovernmental holdings.

Intragovernmental holdings is money the government has collected from revenue programs that take in more money than they spend, so it's money owned to the USA government itsself and is a pretty useless metric.

Simple example: Social security collects 100b in taxes but only pays out 80b. What do they do with the remaining 20b? Buy US certificates so the money ends up in the general fund! Obviously this doesn't really make sense from a "how much debt does a country have"-level, because you can't be in debt to yourself. It's an exercise done for transparency I'm guessing.

As you can see in the table posted in the link above, debt owned by the public did actually decrease during Trump's administration... with $100 million. The rest of the decrease is a result of a decrease in intragovernmental holdings which isn't real debt. You can make a whole bunch of arguments why the intragovernmental holding debt is important and that is fine, but it isn't debt if you are talking about the outstanding US government debt.

It's not like they review them individually. They just sell them. Presumably, buyers are prepared to accept some % of chaff.

I suppose it might be possible to build a programme that reviews lists, but it would have to be done at the seller's end, which would involve industry certification etc. Not sure there's a lot of incentive for that. Honor among thieves is largely mythical.

it doesn't really matter at this point. Lets wait and see what happens when he rolls out his increased military and ICE spending while cutting taxes and then start looking at the numbers.

edit: regarding debt

He's a deranged, incompetent, lunatic.

Aren't the Rs working to hamstring the CBO? We may never know the true effects of this administration's budgets. They may not even have a budget done on time if the first month is reflective of their capacity to govern.

NPR has a text version of the story up now. It doesn't have quite the same impact but basically Gorka calls this guy to rant about tweets and threaten him with WH lawyers while guy records phone call. In addition, Gorka is an unqualified hack that nobody respects. The end.

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/24/517097...r-returns-fire

He should tell the story about how he predicted brexit more often !

I heard Nuremberg,PA is nice this time of the year.

How long do you think before regulations allow a truck without a driver at all to roll down the street?

regulations? lol, we're getting rid of those

Ten years (although under current administration could be 2 years as they just get rid of all regulations)

Won't happen that quick. They'll still require a human presence, even if driving is automated. Plus every state would likely want to approve such a thing separately rather than bow down to a federal waiver.

Companies are going to be pushing hard to eliminate the driver because that's a long time to be paying someone to do nothing. Otherwise they're probably cross train the drivers to do a lot of the work the home office does currently.

Regulations we don't need no stoopid regulations! +1 post btw

maybe a long time but wonder how much of a pay cut the "driver" will end up having to take

Gorka is the worst. That dude def gets me heated.

"There is no animus towards you. I believe that you're a charlatan."

Lol nice

I disagree. There's a ton of benefit for providing a safer truck for the driver. Let me give you another example, collision avoidance-type systems are almost fully automated (ATC, railway routing, ship autopilot, etc.) but they all have a human in the loop. Why do you think that is? Why do you think trucks are different?

Wages is not the same thing as employment, brother bernie.

It'll probably cut the pay in half. At least that's what happened in the factories where all the money was put into the technology. Machines and systems that actually took skill to run now anybody can run. Push the green button to start and the red button to stop. Fire everybody making any decent money and pay the next guy a fraction of what you were paying for the position before. If you have any trouble with the software or machine itself bring in a temp-tech from out of state to fix it.

That's not even close to realistic. Do you think complex machinery doesn't require skill to run?

Where I use to work I could learn to run any machine in the building in a day. I wouldn't call it complex machinery though. What I described is what happened. The people that work there still have received 1 raise in 12 years. The company has picked up some of the increased cost of healthcare so if you count that they have got small raises but they went from middle class to working poor in a decade.