This is the biggest cockgobbling piece of shit "journalism" I've read in ages and it appears the market is buying it for the time being.

Bessent acknowledged that the federal government's mandatory spending – particularly the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs – is a major driver of budget deficits. However, he said he thinks it's more realistic for the incoming Trump administration to focus on curbing discretionary spending, a much smaller portion of the overall federal budget, to create momentum for a future administration to take on entitlement reform.

First, Social Security is not the problem.  Social Security is currently running a modest cash-based deficit, but the key word here is "modest."  Lifting the FICA tax by, say, 1%, lifting the cap by 10% or so or some combination would likely balance it today and, in the next 10 or 20 years die offs from Boomers will start to reduce the outlays.  Bessent knows this because he can read the MTS so assuming he's not deliberately blind he's lying and thus it is my sincere hope that he took six clotshots and gets his just reward for doing so along with his entire family.

I'd usually be a bit more-kind but not this time, and here's why:

"These entitlements are massive. I think the next four years isn't the time to deal with them, that we've got to deal with the discretionary portion of the budget and get that under control. But I think the signal – I always say, crawl, walk, run – we've got to crawl, maybe walk our way to get the current deficits under control, then the next step is for a future administration to have the confidence to be able to deal with entitlements," Bessent said.

The entire problem is in CMS.

CMS is less than 20% funded by tax receipts and as a result you'd have to multiply the current Medicare tax by FIVE in order to bring it into fiscal balance.  That is clearly not going to happen as it would be politically impossible.

But the problem isn't that the system was originally designed out of balance as when it was designed medical care was about 3-4% of the economy; it is that it has been turned into a monstrous scam across the board, all of it wildly illegal through price-fixing and other games and since the laws being violated are felonies and have been on the books for over 100 years.  The validity of this law in application to the medical, health insurance and pharmaceutical industries has been proved up at the Supreme Court more than forty years ago thus it is trivial to fix it -- indict people in size starting with doctors, hospital administrators, drug company and insurance executives.  One of the games used by states to fuck the Federal Government and accelerate the deficit is to assess fees on Medicaid providers, thus driving up the total and funds granted to said state, then they rebate the "assessment" it back to who they took it from.  This sort of shit is wild-eyed accounting fraud and yet it is utterly commonplace.  So is the crazy cost-shift done by Biden during the last year to prevent a over 100% price-spike in Medicare Part D, all occasioned by "deciding" to pay for insanely expensive and dubiously-safe-and-wildly-permanent things that force people into lifetime dependence like Ozempic.

Further, the direct inflationary impact of this deficit spending cannot be avoided due to the destruction of trade sequestration that will not come back in the short term (caused by the Ukraine war related sanctions) and is probably gone forever because economies and trade abhor vacuums and alternatives have already been established.  There is little or no reason to believe that privilege we used to have will ever be restored since we've proved we cannot be trusted at our word and thus just like Jimmy Carter permanently ruined the nuclear fuel reprocessing industry via an Executive Order that Reagan rescinded on the first day, yet here we are more than 20 years later with no commercial reprocessing, the trade sequestration must be considered permanently gone as well.  That's a solid $100 billion+ a year, and perhaps two or three times that much, in deficit spending every single year we didn't have to pay for in inflation but now we do and will forevermore have to into the future.

That change, which we did to ourselves, means that every dollar of deficit spending is immediately inflationary to the United States economy.  So if you want to have a 2% inflation rate in the US you must not have more than a real 2% deficit ex productivity on a cash basis, which is not going to happen in real terms when you pay out 200% of last years hospital CMS payments October-over-October and a roughly 57% comparable-month increase across CMS as a whole -- which we just did!

Bessent thinks he can run a "3-3-3" program; 3% fiscal deficits (about $800 billion total, 3% real productivity and 3 million additional barrels of oil production a day.

Problem: Last fiscal year's deficit was $2 trillion and no, you don't have four years to cut it to $800 billion because the inflationary impact of $2 trillion is about 7% annually so to get to 3% real productivity you would need a gross 10% increase.  That has never happened outside of two periods -- after the deflationary crash of 1920/21 and for a time after WWII when the war had blown up almost literally every single production facility in Europe.  There is a zero probability of the US seeing a gross 10% productivity increase and if you want a real 3% productivity increase into a 3% fiscal deficit it has to be 6% in gross terms which is also fantasy-land bullshit.  The actual real productivity expansion in the 2010 decade was a meager 0.72% annually and the modern-era (last ~20ish years) average is about half that 3% figure.  Only the Internet revolution period in the 1990s has posted up anything like a 3% number in modern times.

No, drilling for more oil is not going to lead to conditions similar to the creation of the Internet.

Yes, I understand that so-called "entitlements" are third rail of politics.  But just like politicians always conflate Social Security (which is easy to fix) with Medicare and Medicaid (which isn't, as the grift is in the latter and not the former) only Medicaid is an "entitlement", that is to say WELFARE in that the other two you paid for during your working life.  Further, fixing it does not require refusing to cover what people paid for and while changing what Medicaid is ought to be done, as I've outlined, because you can provide indigent Americans with superior access to health care without it we can fix the problem in CMS immediately by removing the fraud, theft, and other outrageously felonious behavior without refusing to honor the agreement Americans entered into.

You can huff, puff and chin-wag all you want but the facts are what they are.  The entire problem forcing the deficit higher resides in CMS and it is occurring on an exponential basis -- it is not Social Security.  Yes, discretionary spending is also out of control but cutting discretionary spending back (and we must) will not resolve the issue; you must dismantle the medical monopolists and only the threat of hard prison time, which incidentally 15 USC Ch 1 already provides for and thus there are no new laws required, will do the job and it must be done immediately, not over 4 years or worse, into the next term after Trump leaves office.

We are out of time and must deal with this problem now.

The inflationary spike from October is already baked into the cake because that spending has already happened and essentially all of it was in CMS.  Bessent either knows this and is lying or he hasn't read the MTS in which case, given that he wants the Treasury Secretary's job and claims to be competent to take it he should be locked in a paddock with Mr. Hands after having mare scent slathered on his bare asshole.

This is going to blow up in our face come next year and this chucklefuck is proposing to jam the accelerator to the floor while we're already headed for a solid granite wall, making the outcome much worse.