US debt is growing by $1 trillion every 100 days - clip from Lex Fridman Podcast #458 with Marc Andreessen. Guest bio: Marc Andreessen is an entrepreneur, investor, co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

We're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now. And that's compounding. And it's now passing the size of the Defense Department budget. And it's compounding. And pretty soon, it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days. And then it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days. And then it's going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days. And then if this doesn't get fixed at some point, we enter a hyperinflationary spiral. And we become Argentina or Brazil and kablooey, right? And so everybody in DC knows that something has to be done. And then everybody in DC knows for a fact that it's impossible to do anything, right? They know all the problems. And they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it. But I think what they're not taking into account, what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day. And they can do it on social media. They can completely bypass the press. They can completely bypass the cynicism. They can expose any element of unconstitutional or silly government spending. They can run victory laps every single day on what they're doing. They can bring the people into the process. And again, if you think about it, back to our Machiavellian structure, which is, if you think about, again, you've got democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, rule of the many, rule of the few, rule of the one, you could think about what's happening here as a little bit of a sandwich, right? Which is, we don't have a monarch, but we have a president, rule of the one with some power. And then we have the people who can't organize. But they can be informed, and they can be aware, and they can express themselves through voting and polling. And so there's a sandwich happening right now is the way to think about it, which is, you've got basically monarchy. You've got rule of one combining with rule of many. And rule of many is that you get to vote, right? The people do get to vote, basically. And then, essentially, Congress and the permanent bureaucratic class in Washington as the oligarchy in the middle. And so the White House plus the people, I think, have the power to do all kinds of things here. And I think that would be the way I would watch it. The transparency. I mean, Elon, just by who he is, is incentivized to be transparent and show the bullshit in the system and to celebrate the victories. So it's going to be so exciting. I mean, honestly, it just makes government more exciting, which is a win for everybody. These people are spending our money. These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. OK, here's the thing you hear in Washington. Here's one of the things. So the first thing you hear is, this is impossible. They'll be able to do nothing. And then, yeah, I walk them through this. And they're like, they start to get, it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing. And then they're like, well, it doesn't matter because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military. And so, yeah, you've got this silly, fake, whatever, NPR funding or whatever. And it just is a roundinger, and it doesn't matter. And you look it up in the budget, and it's like, whatever, $500 million or $5 billion. Or it's the charging stations that don't exist. It's the $40 billion of charging stations, and they build eight charging stations. Or it's the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody and cost $30 billion. So these boondoggles. And what everybody in Washington says is $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget. It doesn't matter. Who cares if they make it go away? And, of course, any taxpayer is like, what the? What do you mean? It's $30 billion, right? And then the experts are like, and the press is in on this, too. Then the experts are like, well, it doesn't matter because it's a rounding error. No, it's $30 billion. And if you're this cavalier about $30 billion, imagine how cavalier you are about the $3 trillion. OK. Then there's the, OK, $30 billion. Is $30 billion a lot of the federal budget and percentage? No, it's not. But $30 billion divided by 30, do the math, $30 billion divided by, let's say, 300 million taxpayers, right? Like, what's that, math expert? $100. $100 per taxpayer per year. OK, so $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids, $100 is a meal out. It's a trip to the amusement park. It's the ability to buy additional educational materials. It's the ability to have a babysitter, to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife. There's like 100 things that that person can do with $100 that they're not doing because it's going to some bullshit program that is being basically where the money is being looted out in the form of just like ridiculousness and graft. And so the idea that that $30 billion program is not something that is like a very important thing to go after is just like the level of contempt for the taxpayer is just off the charts. And then that's just one of those programs. There's like 100 of those programs. And they're all just like that. Like, it's not like any of this stuff is running well. Like, the one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well. Like, we know that for sure, right? And we know these people aren't showing up to work. And like, we know that all this crazy stuff is happening, right? And like, you know, do you remember Elon's story of the, do you remember Elon's story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Oh, OK, so like Pennsylvania, OK, so Pennsylvania is like a wonderful state, great history. It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended like other cities into just like complete chaos, violence, madness, and death, right? And the federal government has just like let it happen. It's incredibly violent places. And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids. And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. And it turns out they weren't willing to drive to the polling places because they don't have cars. But if you came and got them, they would go and they would vote. And that's one of the reasons why Trump won. Anyway, so like the law enforcement agencies are off working on like crazy things. Like the system's not working. And so you add up, pick $130 billion programs. All right, now you're, OK, math major, 100 times 100. $10,000. $10,000, OK, $10,000 per taxpayer per year. And but it's also not just about money. That's really, obviously money is a hugely important thing. But it's the cavalier attitude that then in sort of the ripple effect of that, it makes it so nobody wants to work in government and be productive. It makes it so the corruption can, it breeds corruption. It breeds laziness. It breeds secrecy because you don't want to be transparent about having done nothing all year, all this kind of stuff. And you want to reverse that so it will be exciting for the future to work in government. Because the amazing thing, if you're a steel man government, is you can do shit at scale. You have money, and you can directly impact people's lives in a positive sense at scale. It's super exciting, as long as there's no bureaucracy that slows you down, or not huge amounts of bureaucracy that slows you down significantly. So here's the trick. This blew my mind. Because I was, you know, once you open the hell mouth of looking into the federal budget, you learn all kinds of things. So there is a term of art in government called impoundment. And so if you're like me, you've learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment, the federal budget meaning is a different meaning. Impoundment is as follows. The Constitution requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch. So the executive branch goes to Congress, says, we need money, X. Congress does their thing. They come back, and they say, you can have money, Y. The money is appropriated from Congress. The executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on, or on roads to nowhere, or charging stations to nowhere, or whatever. And what's in the Constitution is that Congress appropriates the money. Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations applied by the courts and by the system, which is the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money, the executive branch is not allowed to underspend. Yeah. I'm aware of this. I'm aware of this. And so there's this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, which is September 30th, and it's the great budget flush. And any remaining money that's in the system that they don't know how to productively spend, they deliberately spend it unproductively. Yeah. To the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. A president that doesn't want to spend the money can't not spend it. Yeah. OK, A, that's not what's in the Constitution. And there's actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the great debate on this has played out in the legal world over the last 60 years. Basically, if you look at this with anything resembling, I think, an open mind, you're like, all right, this is not what the founders meant. And then number two, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Can you imagine showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you're doing the right thing and not going home at night and thinking that you've sold your soul? I actually think you sort of headed in a really good point, which is it's even unfair to the people who have to execute this. Yeah. Right, because it makes them bad people and they didn't start out wanting to be bad people. And so there is stuff like this, like. Yeah, everywhere. Everywhere. And so we'll see how far these guys get. I am extremely encouraged what I've seen so far. It seems like a lot of people will try to slow them down, but yeah, perhaps they get far. Yeah.