The milestone figure was recorded just five months after the U.S. hit a record $39 trillion debt in March. It reached $38 trillion five months before that, in October.

The unprecedented $40 trillion figure highlights competing administration priorities, from boosting defense spending that the U.S. relies on to carry out President Donald Trump’s almost-6-month-old war in Iran to lowering the cost of gas and groceries.

Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said the Trump administration “has been focused on slashing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending while accelerating economic growth to get America’s debt-to-GDP ratio trending in the right direction.”

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Source: https://apnews.com/article/treasury-national-debt-limit-a27a8d3651ff810b25c610d3e1b6259d?fbclid=IwY2xjawT6z-pwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR4_JOaiX2ukGNEKsGh5Tq3bp48Zty0Y6uzt5C578YhjWdvf_n2Prts9Rrzvhw_aem_U4ndT3AQu-v_faxPRLpOnw

The post The US national debt now stands at $40 trillion first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

We wish we didn’t, but we live in historic times.  Look at who’s leading this nation at a time when our enemies are consolidating and our presumptive president needs sleep.  It’s starting to feel like the worm is turning.  The gaffs, the mumbling, the pratfalls, and now something really important. There’s something we haven’t been told.

The usual suspects are out in force, doing interviews and telling us that the impeachment inquiry is nothing but a conspiracy theory with no facts to back it up.  Those three or four pesky loudmouths are playing rough with no evidence, they claim.  But things are falling apart on every front.

Can you stand to see what’s going on at the border?  It’s a stomach turning exercise, particularly after the play by play manhunt that went on this week ending in the capture of an illegal, wanted for murder in Brazil, convicted of murdering his girlfriend gruesomely.  He was just another sad sack who’d made his way to the land of opportunity.  How much did the manhunt cost?  How much is the incursion at the border costing?   What on earth is going on?

At no time in human history has anything like this taken place. The details are too idiotic to go into. Our national debt is admittedly out of hand, and we act like the well will never go dry. The truth of many untenable situations is obvious to anyone paying attention, but the networks tell us otherwise.

That may be about to change, insurance policy for the ages or not.  

We’re having electric cars waved in front of our faces day and night.  Why?  Has a panel discussion taken place somewhere that convinces us that electric cars are the future?  The news today is that auto workers are on strike at several factories.  They’re worried that electric cars will be built in such a way that they’re no longer needed.  They also want a big raise.  Where does the power that charges electric vehicles come from?  

Do you remember the news worrying whether the power grid would hold up during inclement weather?  Maybe the demands are greater, but we never worried that there wouldn’t be sufficient wind to generate what we needed.  Texas is on board with saving the planet.  Well, we’ve got windmills anyway, the life expectancy and power generated is a taboo subject.  Things are being done on the basis of feelings rather than brass tacks.  You’d think this would all be explained logically, but that’s not the case when it comes to saving the planet.  China and India think it’s nuts.

Word has it that we’re about to be legally bound by W.H.O. regulations. 

They’ve got to convict Donald Trump of something!  Otherwise the destruction might be turned around, and no self-respecting liberal can stand for that.  How dare we love the United States?  We hate seeing what is being done, and even worse, why.  The idea of the nation being saved, being turned back to the traditions we were founded upon, is reprehensible to the “new” values that we’re being spoon-fed on a daily basis.  

The values this nation was founded upon were enduring. These buffoons have tried everything and they’re almost there! If they could just stamp out those of us who remember that God’s blessings are beyond anything these do-gooders can come up with. We’d like to preserve them. The Feast of Trumpets falls tomorrow, and pictures the return of Jesus Christ to this earth. We celebrate it every year as the Bible dictates. Some things we’re never going to stop doing, no matter what.

Mark

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – September 15, 2023 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The “news” is despicable.  It’s hard to imagine anything less interesting than listening to some doctor speculate.  Especially when they roll out predictions about the number of Americans that will die on account of the scary virus.  We are experiencing the panic the media and left-wing politicians have been trying desperately to sell us about global warming!  You don’t suppose the great toilet paper panic has been overblown?

This is the panic they’d hoped to engender over global warming.  But that never worked.  Now doctors with “impeccable credentials” are all over the media not only spreading panic but criticizing the President for not “listening to advise from the doctors.”  If we’d listened to the “experts” and the “scientists,” we’d all be riding bicycles by now on account of global warming!  But it may not matter now.  Since a state of emergency was declared, governors, mayors and county commissioners have taken it upon themselves to “lockdown” whole populations with threats of fines and imprisonment if they don’t get back in their houses.  So we can’t go outside now?

In some places, police may pull you over to demand where you think you’re going.   Do they have that authority?  Has the Constitution been suspended?  One radio commentator in Texas is encouraging patriots to demand chapter and verse in the law to get local law enforcement to justify their encroachment on every freedom they’ve revoked.

Not since Obama had shovel-ready jobs has so much government money been thrown at the economy.  What’s another couple of trillion?  Maybe we won’t get sick, but we will suffer economic pain the likes of which we’ve never seen.  Because the government has to make sure “everybody is safe.”  Well, not safe from bankruptcy.  Never fear, they’ve got a plan for that too.  They’ll just send everybody a check, amounting in the aggregate to two or three trillion dollars.  What’s the difference, we’re already $22 Trillion in debt.  Where’s all that money going to come from?  Why our kids and grandkids of course.  Who cares if we mortgage their futures, as long as we’re all “safe?”

Shelter in place?  That’s the order from somewhere on high, and it’s been enacted now in Dallas, Texas.  The government can’t trust us to look after ourselves.  In fact, we have no good sense at all.  Now apparently we need law enforcement checking parking lots to ensure no one is at work!   Reports are the national guard is at a “state of readiness,” ready for what we’re not sure and dare not ask.

Our local (Smith County) Commissioner explained why he’s not ordering residents to shelter in place in a broadcast statement.  He said that people should have the freedom to make their own decisions regarding where they go and what they do, and should be credited with having enough sense to take their own precautions.  (Oops.  Some late-breaking nonsense about essential services only.  I’m expecting that we’ll hold an “essential service” tomorrow.  Who do these “authorities” think they are?) But Texas Governor Abbot already called for meetings of no more than ten people at any given time or place, and that applies to our county too.  But the neighboring county (Gregg) is not so lucky.  Local radio news has been counting down the hours ’till all residents are ordered to “shelter in place.”  Police are authorized to enforce the order and may pull over any vehicle to make sure no-one is flaunting the local authorities.  And they’ve got paperwork you’d better be able to show officers that you’re involved in “essential services” if they question you.  Is this still Texas?

In their zeal to “keep everybody safe,” government, all the way down to the state and city level is making sure no one escapes the fall-out from the kung-flu (That’s right, I said it even if Trump didn’t).  Enterprises of every description are looking at the real possibility of going out of business.  But first employees will be laid off while everyone is advised to stay home.

No doubt, the reports are scary.  But not nearly as scary as the swine flu.  You can look it up.  Sixty million Americans came down with it, yet we hardly remember.  How can that be?  That’s because the media treated Obama as a genius, really on top of things as a great leader.

Trump, however, is portrayed as a dunce who cares more about his personal and political fortunes more than human life.  Apparently, the pressure from the news media and his advisors were too great to bear.  He’s gone along with this, and now most everything is closed.  Except, of course, the grocery stores, and they’re even limiting hours.  You can drive down an all-but-empty street until you pass the grocery store, and there’s not a parking place to be found.

The more you hear… California law enforcement is now using drones with night vision to make sure everyone complies with the “lock-down.”  If there’s some Constitutional provision for law enforcement making sure we don’t leave our homes, we must have missed it.  Apparently the Constitution takes a back seat when officials of one kind or another orders citizens to “shelter in place.”  It’s beginning to look like the authorities will destroy the nation to make sure everybody’s “safe.”

By these standards, it’s a wonder they didn’t ban the wheel a long time ago.  Some 35,000 perish in traffic accidents annually, and that’s way down from the 70’s and 80’s.  The coronavirus is so far responsible for 600 deaths, and many of those are attributed to preexisting health conditions.  You do the math.  It’s a wonder the network anchors aren’t screaming for cars to be banned, but then that might inconvenience them.

The President said, “Whoever heard of shutting the country down?”  Exactly!  Whoever heard of such a thing?  Except that’s exactly what they’ve done.  It may turn out to have been a stupendous mistake, but we’ll see.  Have you noticed the rediscovery of borders?  Apparently they’re not such a bad thing after all.  In Australia I’m told, travel from state to state has been curtailed.  Some people who were traveling when the panic hit can’t even get home.  Maybe national borders weren’t such a bad idea after all!

It’s getting easier by the minute to see how “authorities” will foist a panic upon the population to ensure compliance with whatever they demand.  Liberals are more excited than ever about the prospect of some “global enforcement” body to manage crisis.  Apparently they only have to declare an “emergency,” and all rights and freedoms are suspended immediately.

Italy has been used to scare the be-jabbers out of us.  But it turns out that Northern Italy has been turned into a virtual Chinese colony.  They’ve taken over whole towns and villages that were once examples of Italian culture and turned them into Chinatown.  The vast exposure rate and death toll in Italy have been touted in media around the world as proof that we’d better be in a state of panic if we know what’s good for us.  What the mainstream news is not telling us is that the horrible news mainly comes from Northern Italy which has become a bastion of Chinese culture, and the flights to and from China were not curtailed.  So who runs Italy?

My Dad often supposed aloud that it would be an economic crisis that would bring about a collapse of the EU and presage the formation of a ten-nation combine, called the beast power of Bible prophecy.  The EU is in tremendous economic trouble, not to mention the cultural blight they’ve brought upon themselves.  Let’s hope this is not it.  But it’s a wake-up call regardless.

Mark

PS. We’re being asked about our plans for upcoming Holy Days, and we simply don’t know yet. We’re trying to carry on as best possible without outright disobeying the President, the Governor and running afoul of local authorities.  We’ll get the word out to everyone as soon as we’re able to make those decisions confidently.  In the meantime, we’re making Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread services widely available on DVD and on our websites.  Stan’s sermon from last week pulled a record number of views and he’s doing an outstanding job, for which we are most grateful.

Source:  http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 27 March 2020 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The post Trump says that the US will grow its way out of the $22 trillion debt first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The reality is our leaders, our politicians, our elected officialsOpens a New Window.…people that we elected to preserve our future, people we elected to make sure our children and their children were taken care of have spent $22 trillion more than we have sent them through the years and it is only getting worse.

Just last week, President Trump Opens a New Window. did a 90 minute State of the Union address. Not one word was uttered about the debt and deficits. The Democrats had a rebuttal. Not one word was uttered about the debt and deficits. One politician was asked about the debt and deficits. his answer: “No one here cares!”

Well many of us do care. We know it is our debt. We know it is the economy that will eventually take the fall, while most of these politicians will be retired.

So what is the outcome of all this? It’s not good. For starters, because of all this debt, the first $500 billion of our tax dollars will go towards interest on the debt next year. That’s $500 billion going towards nothing.

Not going towards children, the elderly, the downtrodden, the poor or the infirm. It’s not going towards the roads, bridges, streets, sewers, trains or anything these same politicians complain we need to fix every day. $500 billion goes down the toilet because of the debt they created. We bet you haven’t heard that one.

How about this? Estimates are that in just a few years, we will be at $30 trillion of debt in where $1 trillion each year will be going towards interest on the debt. Feel better now? But let’s simplify it even more.

Every day, approximately $3 billion is added to our debt. Every day, approximately $1.5 billion is going towards paying the interest on the debt. Yet, upon agreement on the latest budget, we heard one politician who has been in DC for 40 years say that this latest budget represents their values.

There was no mention of their values of massive debt and deficits.

We would like to put lipstick on this pig, but there is just no way to spin it any other way. We are heading for something unfathomable because the numbers are now unfathomable and it is even more unfathomable that the people we are depending on to fix this are not even pretending they care.

Wish we had better news. We just deal in reality.

Gary Kaltbaum is a registered investment advisor with more than 30 years of experience in the markets. He is owner and president of Kaltbaum Capital Management, a financial investment advisory firm headquartered in Orlando, Florida. He is a Fox News Channel Business Contributor regularly appearing on Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network. Gary is the author of the book “The Investors Edge” and is also the host of a nationally syndicated radio show with the same title “Investors Edge” which is broadcast on numerous stations across the U.S.

Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/national-debt-hits-22-trillion-signaling-titanic-like-ending

The post National debt hits $22 trillion signaling Titanic like ending first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.