national debt

Your Share and Mushrooms


POST 1268

What It’s All About

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT let Trump’s war distract you from his culpability in the Epstein crimes. Trump is trying to cloud your eyes with this war. That’s what it’s all about. Instead, focus on the pedophilia.

Your Share

It’s a fool’s errand to calculate your individual share of our national debt. The total now stands at roughly $39 TRILLION.

Okay, I’m fool enough to do that. We divide the total debt by roughly 330 million Americans and your share is $118,000. Same for your infant son, Same for his big sister. Same for each of their grandparents. And Trump’s pet legislation, BBB, will add another $10 trillion to our debt and pile another $30,000 onto everybody’s personal bill.

Let’s focus on just the additional $200 billion Trump wants for his blisteringly stupid war against Iran. That extra will add $606 to everyone’s tab, all 330 million of us. And you know that if he doesn’t go all TACO, he’ll be demanding still more money from you soon. It’ll be like nothing anyone has ever seen.

Note that the $200 billion is on top of our current military budget of between $901 billion and $1 trillion. That’s just for “defense.” That’s more than the defense spending of the next 9 or 10 countries combined. Makes me wonder why we need to spend that much. Got insight into that?

That baseline defense spending equates to $2,730 of debt for each of us – just for the Defense Department. Every year. Adding in the $606 supplementary cash grab each of us will owe for Trump’s Iran blue bomb special, if authorized, will bring your share of our military bill this year to $3,396. Feeling good about that?

Mushrooms

“If you look for mushrooms, you will find mushrooms.” – William Raspberry, Washington Post columnist.

The point is that we find what we are looking for, even as we might miss other things, like truth.

Our fact spurning president in 2003, George W. Bush, “found” WMDs in Iraq. They’re what he looked for. The United Nations weapons inspectors refuted the vague and unsubstantiated claims used by Bush to justify his call to war, as they came largely from an individual who was well known to be psychologically unstable. Plus, our own intelligence community told him that they were far from sure that Saddam had WMDs or was working to develop them. Read this Los Angeles Times post from 2005 for detail.

Dubya and VP Cheney wanted to make war on Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Dubya told us he was a “bad guy” and a “cruel dictator” and to Bush that was enough to topple him. I recall thinking at the time that there are many bad guy leaders around the world. Were we going to make war against all of them?

But then Dubya’s war guy Donald Rumsfeld told us that Iraqis would welcome our troops, throwing flowers to them. When challenged by what such a war would cost, Rumsfeld told us that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, just as though it was ours to take. That made it clear what that invasion really was about.

In the process of that war thousands died and the entire region became even more chaotic, with fallout that continues today. That’s just some of the wages of myopic focus on what Bush wanted to find and, generally, regime change wars. It’s clear that we refused to learn our lesson then, since or now.

Now we are burdened by a president who doesn’t even look for metaphorical mushrooms. He just makes stuff up to suit his craziness, “finding” whatever “alternative facts” will get him what he wants. Indeed, Andy Borowitz wrote,

Confirming the suspicions of many in the international community, on Monday Donald J. Trump revealed that intelligence played “no role” in his decision to go to war with Iran.

“People keep asking me about intelligence,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I made this call with no intelligence whatsoever.”

Trump has wanted to attack Iran for a very long time. We’ll leave it to the professional mental health experts to figure out his pre-dementia obsession that he’s now metastasized into a regional war.

Meanwhile, we live with the consequences of Trump finding reasons to make war and refusing truth. People are dying, like the 175 Iranian school girls. That’s happened without the benefit of truth that could easily have been found before the bombings began, had the people in charge been looking for it. Consider that as the body count and your prices rise, as our allies refuse us and as Putin wins more and more.

If Trump goes after Iran’s infrastructure, as he’s promised he will, try to imagine what Iran will do. Terrorism is what Iran does best. What do you think Trump will do if they come after our infrastructure?

Quote Of The Week

Societies that adopt conspiratorial explanations for political, social and economic problems lose the ability to rationally redress them.

Think: demonizing immigrants, non-European Whites, non-Christians, anybody Trump doesn’t like; etc.

Moral Inversion

By now you know both that Robert S. Mueller has died and that Trump has celebrated his death. You could brush that off as just another case of Trump neurotically making everything about himself, but it’s more than that.

Once again Trump has portrayed himself as a poor victim where there is no victimization. He’s demanded that his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent call for sympathy for Trump, the victim. even as Mueller is the one who died and whose family is grieving. Steve Schmidt captured it this way:

This is not conservatism. It is not populism. It is not even politics. It is the normalization of moral inversion.

I do not call on you to accept this abhorrent display of a false victim blaming a most honorable man who never victimized him. Rather, I implore you to fire the false victim. So .  .  .

Make Your Voice Heard This Saturday

Click here to find a No Kings rally near you. Then show up on March 28. Change our atmosphere that has been poisoned by our home grown fascists. Make it clear that they are the minority and that we are the majority.

The cure for hopelessness is action.
  • Time for action is dwindling

    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too (IT’S A FREEBIE!), because it’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not necessarily mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine, but I do wish that I could blame someone else. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Book links to Amazon or Barnes & Noble are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
    5. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source information.
    6. Comments offered by readers, whether in agreement with my opinions or opposing, are encouraged and greatly appreciated. All are reviewed prior to going live. I reserve the right to edit for readability, punctuation, typos, voluntary idiocy and to exclude those comments I deem inappropriate.
    7. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine. Unless it’s a guest essay, in which case, blame the guest.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

 Scroll to top