Scott Horton details how endless wars bankrupt America, noting the $40 trillion national debt where interest payments now exceed Medicare and Medicaid budgets. He describes the current system as a debt Ponzi scheme fueled by money printing, disrupted by the petrodollar cycle's decline and exacerbated by artificial prosperity bubbles created during the 2020 lockdowns. Critiquing both Trump and Biden for manipulating asset prices to avoid recessions, Horton warns of impending hyperinflation akin to Weimar Germany and argues that withdrawing from global conflicts is essential to prevent further economic collapse and restore international credibility. [Automatically generated summary]
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The Debt Ponzi Scheme00:14:55
When you talk about a $40 trillion national debt, it's virtually impossible to even comprehend how many dollars that is, how much money that is that the American people are on the hook for, and that we have to pay the interest on every single year.
And the interest on the national debt now, even at artificially low interest rates, is more than the world empire itself, more than Medicare or Medicaid as well.
The national debt is increasing by trillions of dollars, like every year or two.
It's completely out of control.
Welcome to today's interview.
We have returning guest Scott Horton for part two of our interview.
And in part one, oh, by the way, Scott Horton, of course, with ScottHortonAcademy.com, a libertarian, an author, commentator.
He works with antiwar.com and so much more.
And in part one, we talked about the delusions of the American empire, thinking that war will always be a solution to the very problems that were instigated by the empire itself.
In this segment, I'm going to start out by asking Scott, What are the economic consequences to the American people as we are increasingly thrust into poverty because of the endless money printing?
I had tweeted out earlier today, I said, if you want to end the war, end the Fed, because without the Fed printing, you're not going to have these wars.
But welcome back, Scott.
And can you just start off with that question?
What are the economic consequences for Americans if we continue to pursue wars of empire?
Yeah, well, look, I'm so glad that you're asking this.
This is just absolutely crucial for people to understand.
Is that empire ultimately is murder suicide?
We're destroying ourselves in the name of getting at our enemies and worse, fighting Israel's enemies.
It's all at the expense of the American people.
And we can already tell that they don't care about us when the question is any other thing.
It's the same thing for the empire.
They know that they're essentially using the American people as cannon fodder and as tax fodder to go and fund all these operations that ultimately pay no dividends whatsoever to the American people.
Not that they would justify it if they were just looting gold from the foreigners to bring back home or whatever.
Stealing is still wrong.
But this is all just clearly at the expense of the American people.
As Garrett wrote, in the American empire, everything goes out and nothing comes back.
So you have the special interests, but the special interests are people like Lockheed, who they're reaching their hand into the stream of wealth as it goes out of the country in the form of these weapons of destruction, right?
Rather than whatever.
Making sure that we all get to pay less for bananas or whatever kind of thing would somehow make it seem like it was in our interest.
And so when you talk about a $40 trillion national debt, it's virtually impossible to even comprehend how many dollars that is, how much money that is that the American people are on the hook for, and that we have to pay the interest on every single year.
And the interest on the national debt now, even at artificially low interest rates, is more than the world empire itself, more than Medicare or Medicaid as well.
The only Item in the national budget more than the interest on the debt now is Social Security.
And even that is just a matter of time.
The national debt is increasing by trillions of dollars, like every year or two.
It's completely out of control.
And the only way that the government can get away with this is by printing money and buying up old bad debt with new money.
And of course, then they also license the banks to create money and to loan out new money.
As long as the banks promise to also buy government debt, then the government will license the banks to get away with the same crime.
What you're describing.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry, but you're describing a debt Ponzi scheme, which is what we're living under right now.
But what allowed this to succeed for all these decades is that there were always other buyers for treasuries, right?
So there were other countries, many of them Gulf state countries, that no longer have a revenue model, by the way, at the moment.
So, you know, for example, Saudi Arabia would sell oil in dollars, exclusively in dollars for a long time, a petrodollar, and then would take those dollars and buy treasuries and basically thrust those dollars back into the U.S. system, enabling the U.S. to print more currency and have more debt.
But that cycle, Which has really been, I would say, the US empire ripping off the world for generations.
That cycle is being severely disrupted right now and it may fail.
So, will it fail in your view or could it?
What do you think happens next?
Well, I think the failure of the dollar as the world reserve currency is sort of a slow motion process.
There may be no stopping it at this point.
More and more you see other countries using their own currencies to trade with each other and just freezing us out in that way.
I don't think there's probably another major currency or even like so called basket of other currencies that could be combined into a new global currency to replace the US dollar.
Virtually every national government has the same problem, and every central bank has the same problem.
They only know how to print money all day and they don't know how to stop.
And so everybody else's currency also sucks and oftentimes much worse than the dollar in terms of its stability over time.
We have had, though, a major disruption since the days of the COVID lockdowns in 2020.
Where Trump and then Biden both, Trump's first term and then Biden both created so much new money.
And that wasn't even the Fed.
I mean, that was just the Treasury sending out bazillions of dollars of checks to everyone, but also especially big business to keep all of the biggest, most politically connected interests afloat during that enforced crash at that time.
So they created something like one third of all the dollars ever created during that time.
And so that has caused a huge shock to the system and encouraged more people to try to get out.
From under the dollar, it's almost like a slow motion crack up boom, right?
People are afraid.
The Chinese are buying more and more gold and diversifying out of their US government debt.
And in Austrian economics, Mises teaches about what's called the crack up boom.
And this is like what happened in Weimar, Germany, where confidence in the currency just collapses and inflation gets to hyperinflation levels where people are taking wheelbarrows full of currency to the store to buy a loaf of bread and this kind of thing.
Where the currency loses value by hundreds of percents in a day, this kind of thing.
And that is like the worst case scenario, but it is a potential problem that the US could face if you have, especially the central banks around the world, panic and try to dump US securities because they just don't believe that, you know, at whatever interest rate they can try to charge to get their payoff is either would be worth it or that their demand will matter and that America.
Will pay at some point.
We come up against the brick wall of unbelief in the system.
And then I got the worst part of all this inflationary money to me is, and I've seen this my whole life.
I know you've seen this your whole life.
When I was a kid, it was the 1980s real estate crash, the SNL crisis, and all of that.
But it keeps happening over and over.
There was another major recession in 92.
There was, of course, the massive crash of 99 of the dot com bubbles, and then the catastrophe of the Great Recession in 2008.
And what happens is these are the corrections.
And this is what Austrian school economics teaches that nobody else seems to get right these terrible recessions are the necessary correction to bubbles of artificial prosperity created by all the inflationary money.
So think of it like this where the government inflates whatever amount of money instead of having all prices across the board for cars and trucks and And food and clothes and whatever, whatever in your market basket.
Instead of all of those prices all going up by a certain percent, what happens is some of those prices go way up and you end up having bubbles in certain sectors.
Like, especially if you look at the W. Bush years, for example, it was in food and fuel and, well, really fuel and therefore food and housing.
And they were especially funneling so much money into housing.
And then those prices then were artificially high.
And the only correction to that was a massive crash of the price of housing, which then led to the devastation of everybody who was invested in mortgage debt, which was a lot of people, including pension funds and including foreign governments and all these people and the American people, who, especially homeowners, are essentially incentivized to believe that the increasing value of their house is the closest thing they have to like a real savings account.
In inflationary times, the interest rate at your bank is so low that you have to either speculate in the stock market.
Or buy property and hope that that property is going to keep going up in value.
Donald Trump referenced this recently when he said, Look, I know young people are upset that they can't get into a house, but if I do anything to cause the prices of houses to go down, well, that'll hurt all of the older people who already own homes.
And so that's not good.
So screw you, young people who can't afford to get into a house, because we have the current homeowners' prices are artificially high.
And the pain for them to come down to market rates would be.
Unforgivable and unsustainable.
So we have to continue to inflate the bubble.
And that's why, in fact, I read the headline this morning.
He's threatening to fire the chairman of the Fed because the chairman of the Fed won't lower interest rates and increase inflation.
Because Trump's greatest worry in the world is that the next crash is going to come on his watch.
While he's still here, he's got to kick that can down the road.
And so, in other words, when you're just dying from inflationary prices, you can't get into a house.
You can't afford to raise a family.
You can't afford food.
You can't afford a vehicle, whatever, all the most important necessities in life.
Those are the good times.
That's the artificial prosperity before the Great Depression comes to correct from the artificial bubbles that you're suffering through.
Right, right.
And it really sucks.
You mentioned the Bush years or the Clinton years.
And in those times, there was a willingness to allow some level of correction.
To happen in markets like housing, for example.
But it seems like today, especially with Trump and his enormous ego, they're not willing to let anything go through an organic correction, certainly not in stocks.
But the only things they want to keep low are artificially low, like gold and silver and oil.
And that's all through paper contract selling, which is another manipulation.
But it seems like the stock market is always artificially propped up, and it seems like treasury yields are artificially kept down.
Because the Fed will print money to buy the treasuries to keep the yields down.
And so we've entered this era of absolute artificiality.
There are no organic signals that are allowed to propagate in the marketplace.
And there's so much manipulation from the White House about announcing this and markets crash or announce that and commodities rise.
And a bunch of insiders are making a lot of money on those announcements, clearly with all kinds of betting and options and poly markets sometimes.
But the average person is just completely screwed in all of this.
And if your only assets are your house and your stocks, you're still screwed because both of those are artificial.
Wouldn't you agree with that or do you or not?
Yes.
I mean, and look, this is going to be a catastrophe the next time the markets crash, and they can't always prevent it.
I mean, you know, like with what happened with the mortgage crisis in 2008, there are mandatory schedules for when the payments have to be made on that debt.
And when the payments aren't getting made, at some point, they have to admit it.
It's actually a funny scene in the movie The Big Short.
They go and meet the lady from Moody's and they say, How can you keep Given these things triple A ratings.
I love that scene.
The debts are not being paid.
And she says, essentially, we're going to use bubble gum and string to put off admitting the truth for one more quarter, is all they can do.
But eventually, the iron laws of the universe kick in and kick your ass.
And there's no way to stop it.
So, you know, they're whistling past the graveyard, is what they're doing.
They're making matters worse for everybody by prolonging it.
And so, I guess my question to you is how long do you think this charade can be kept up?
Because, in my view, I mean, I thought the system was going to crater following the great financial crisis of 2008.
I was surprised that they could pump it up this long, but maybe they can longer.
You know, I mean, how much money printing can continue, especially another 500 billion requested for the Pentagon budget, by the way?
But how long can this go on?
It's really a great question.
I don't know.
I do know that, you know, like I was saying about the other major countries have the same problem too.
I saw a funny tweet.
About how I believe it was the Russians demanded payment from the Indians for Russian oil.
They demanded payment in rubles andor maybe even in dollars.
This is about a year ago.
And then somebody tweeted, Yeah, everybody's a multilateralist till you're trying to settle your debts in rupees.
And then all of a sudden, everybody's going, You know, Benjamin Franklin is a real man.
You can count on him.
He'll be worth $99 next week.
You know what I mean?
If not $100, but at least we'll know.
More or less where he'll be a week from now.
And so I think, you know, having a bunch of bums as our global competitors helps for sure.
But how long that can really continue to prop up the dollar, like, you know, this far overextended beyond the wealth that it actually, you know, represents or even the threat that it represents to our allies to stay inside our fold and work within our economic system and all that, I really don't know.
The Bluff Has Been Called00:08:43
Like, what's the actual breaking point?
I don't know.
I mean, honestly, as we were talking about in the last segment, the bluff has been called on our military empire, not just in the Middle East, but ultimately everywhere, right?
Our conventional deterrent is canceled.
So I would expect the rest of the history of this year and the immediate or the intermediate future here to be the great unraveling of that entire world order.
What the result looks like, I don't know.
And making it worse is the fact that the U.S. continues to punish its own allies that are.
Traditional purchasers of Treasury debt.
For example, the US Navy blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, which affected all of Western Europe a couple years ago when that happened and basically cratered a lot of their industry in Germany in particular, which used to be the industrial powerhouse of Western Europe.
But on top of that, think about Taiwan.
They're running out of natural gas.
How are they going to power the power grid?
How are they going to manufacture?
They're supposed to be US allies who buy US debt and buy US weapons.
Japan suffering its own economic problems that are severe.
Forced eventually to unload a lot of its hundreds of billions of dollars of treasury debt in order to shore up its own central bank problems, which occur for the very much the same reason because of money printing.
So it's like America runs around the world bombing its enemies and slitting the throat of its allies and then wondering, like, how come people don't love us?
Yeah.
And like when it comes to supporting forces on the ground, too, we'll give you all kinds of promises all day long about how great it's going to be and then turn around and Leave you high and dry anyway.
Not that we have a choice.
I'm not arguing for staying, but I'm arguing for not giving out these kinds of promises in the first place.
Local forces, I mean, look at the way they tried to get the Kurds.
You know, they did get some Kurdish communists to do their little uprising in January that was very short lived there in Iran.
But when they tried again at the end of February, beginning of March war, they couldn't find any Kurdish communists to round up and arm up and send in there.
Not enough of them are dumb enough to believe in American promises, not after what's happened in Iraq and what's happened in Syria and everywhere else.
Right.
Right.
So, um, so it's pretty hard, pretty hard to bluff the world into doing what you want when nobody believes your threats or your promises in any way, you know?
Well, and that speaks to one of the greatest costs of this, of what I believe the Trump administration has done is more than any other president before, including himself, he has shredded America's reputation and credibility on the international stage.
Like you just said, no one believes America's promises, no one is experiencing America's protection.
Even America's Iron Dome, that was supposed to protect Israel, is a total failure.
And the Gulf states, most of the military bases there are destroyed, and their economies are just being absolutely ruptured.
Look at what's happening to real estate in Abu Dhabi, right?
I mean, the whole thing is in a state of collapse, and everybody's going to be pointing to America and saying, You did this, Trump.
You did this.
It's obvious.
Silver linings on a very dark cloud.
You know, I really hate this war, and it is an absolute idiot thing to do.
Will end up empowering a lot of bad guys over there.
But as far as destroying the credibility of the American empire around the world, I'm all for that.
I mean, in reality, that's not quite.
I'm slightly for that.
What I really want is for America to adopt a Ron Paulian foreign policy where we just stop.
We come home deliberately because we want to and we think it's the right thing, not because we screwed up one last catastrophe into a crisis so badly that we finally got it through our thick heads to quit, but whatever.
Either way, We cannot afford it, and it's not necessary for America to be the dominant force in the old world.
And so, um, I honestly hate to have it where our bluff is called and we have to retreat in a way that could be very destabilizing.
I mean, for example, if just forget the rest of the world for a minute, if we're withdrawing from Eastern Asia, then we don't just want to leave a situation where Japan and Korea and everybody else, and there's you know, 17 countries around China where.
Where everyone just feels like, oh no, now they're all helpless before the giant Chinese behemoth.
And now South Korea and Japan want to race toward nuclear weapons, maybe even Thailand or whoever.
We don't want that.
We don't want to withdraw in a way where it's totally destabilizing and encourages conflict.
What we'd like, what would be better would be to withdraw slowly and make sure that everybody understands each other real well.
That, like, look, China, everybody knows you've got H bombs and everybody knows Japan doesn't.
But Japan, you don't really want atom bombs or H bombs because, first of all, tradition.
But second of all, You don't want to destabilize your relationship with China and give them a reason to worry about what you're doing either.
So, like, everybody be cool as we withdraw.
That would obviously be the best way to do it, not just be like humiliated and broken and bankrupt and have to withdraw in a way where everybody's still on edge and maybe even their tensions all get heightened.
So, it could be very risky, but in the largest sense, we need to just stop.
It's just like with any of these wars writ small.
There's no solution to our war in Somalia any more than there was a solution to our war in Afghanistan or our current war in Iran.
And there's really no solution to waging the world empire in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia either.
We really have to just quit.
So we should try to do it as smartly as possible and just come home.
If they want to say that.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
No, that sounds like great advice, but I'm pretty sure our administration is going to triple down on stupid here and keep going in.
But look, we're almost out of time.
I insist.
What?
The Cood insists.
So, yeah.
Right, right, right.
That's true.
Tell us about your website as we wrap this up, ScottHortonAcademy.com, about your work and what people can find there.
Yeah.
So, the Scott Horton Academy is essentially, as Tom Wood says, Scott Horton slowed down so you can catch up.
So, me going through my books enough already and provoked and giving you the deep dive courses on, you know, and really trying to get everybody up to date on what all has happened here.
I know that when I tell these long stories about, The cause and effect through the Middle East or in Eastern Europe, which I'm sorry, I never did answer your question about provoked there in Eastern Europe, but same difference where each intervention becomes an excuse for more and more and more.
When I tell those stories, a lot of people know much of what I'm talking about.
And so I really feel like my job in the world is to help fill in all these puzzle pieces for you so that the timeline in your head is complete and you understand how each one of these things help create the excuse for the next thing to happen and ultimately to make yourself immune.
To this kind of propaganda, make it so that the next time a crisis breaks out, you'll be able to explain to your friends and family, well, here's what's really going on here and why you don't have to believe in the S that they're shoveling this time.
And so that's the point to make a hundred thousand Scott Hortons out there to be able to stand up to and debunk all of this propaganda.
And that's at Scott Horton Academy.com.
And in fact, you can get a good taste of that if you're interested at thefactsaboutiran.com.
Okay, great.
We will show that site, thefactsaboutiran.com.
Also, want to mention your handle on X is Scott Horton Show, correct?
Yes, sir.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much, Scott, for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure.
I really appreciate you and your understanding of world events, I think it's critical for our time.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
Absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
All right.
Thank you.
And thank you for watching.
If you missed part one of this interview, you can find that at brightvideos.com.
And thank you for your support of our platform as we fight for peace and sanity in a world that seems increasingly insane.
It's You know, it didn't have to be this way, right?
We could choose a different timeline as a nation, as an empire.
We could choose peace and abundance, but instead, that's not what's happening.
So, we need to adapt and we need to understand and we need to try to influence others to redirect towards peace and abundance based on solid economic principles, libertarian principles of economics, Austrian economics.
Ron Paul Was Right00:00:21
Basically, Ron Paul was right about almost everything.
So, thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here, brightvideos.com.
Take care.
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