69
Trump blames Biden as he hits back at Xi’s dismissal of US as ‘declining nation’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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Isn't China in far more debt than the US? About 300% of its GDP. Sure, we're declining, but so are they and they never really rose.
Trumps just sped up our decline.
Sort of wrong metric. It gets weird in China because of the blurred lines between their government and private enterprise.
China's official government debt is only 98% of GDP so slightly lower than the US right now and a lot less than the US is projected to be by end of 2026 (125%).
However China's total debt, which includes both public-private enterprise (which their government effectively controls), and household debt, is around 330% of GDP. A lot of people use the total debt figure since it makes more sense for their economic structure but it's not really "right".
If we want to take the USA by the same metric, the government debt of 124% pales in comparison to the US total debt of... 719%.
Except that's 600% of private enterprise and household/consumer debt which is not really government controlled and does not have a direct impact on the government's solvency.
Who's winning, if anyone at all?
Going by government, it's only a ~25% difference; domestically it's twice as worse in USA, but that's not what governments are concerned about.
Chinese debt is largely domestic, so the government can pay it when it’s convenient or choose not to pay it at all.
China has (or had until very recently) over a trillion in US debt.
Government debt isn't inherently bad.
For example, Infrastructure projects typically pay back several times in value, so it's often sensible to fund these using debt. China has built shitloads of infrastructure over the past couple of decades
Government debt is bad if it's not funding infrastructure and is instead being used to pay for things like tax breaks on the wealthy and vanity projects
https://debtclock.io/
They're 110 to our 133 apparently.
Japan is absolutely wild at twice of Japan, no idea what's going on there. But presumably they're investing heavily in AI or something
Credit fuels a growing economy and smothers a failing one. At some point the US economy must collapse. This is why the US are going after all the major trade chokepoints in a desperate attempt to maintain dominance using their military might.
You act like America is acting like a rational country...
trump invested in oil so he wanted to raise the price of oil.
For him, the way to do that is prevent competition from doing business.
It's pretty easy to get a handle on his thought process by watching The Sopranos. trump wants to be Tony, even though Tony was wildly incompetent. Not that trump ever watched the show, he grew up around the real thing. He idolizes the last generation of incompetent NYC mobsters that Tony is based on.
There's no 4D chess or grand strategy, he just makes the most selfish decision at every chance that he thinks he can get away with, and right now he thinks he can get away with anything.
If a random person told him they'd cut him 10 million on a grift, he does what they say and then tries to capture the grift and cut out whoever brought it to be.
Logically it makes sense Venezuela was at the behest of American corps, but then trump decided he could take it even further, so he unilaterally shut down the largest shipping route for oil on the planet.
Just cuz it would make his bank account numbers go up a little more.
That's it. Pure simple greed from someone whose brain is mush, he just knows he wants more money, that's the only motivation for anything America does while he's in charge. There's just gonna be a lot of evil shit because no one in power cares to stop it.
Like, if you're mad about it (everyone should be) you need to understand what's happening to effectively stop it.
We have to fuck his money up
I don't actually think he has as much control as people think. I think he's the ideal president for the military to do whatever the fuck it wants and use him as an excuse for how crazy it seems.
He's purged the military at the highest levels...
Buddy, you just don't seem to be informed on this topic, which is fine, but stop making random guesses and start asking questions if you want to learn anything