Name: How Did America Get THIS Deep in Debt? (w/ Thomas Massie)
Uploaded: 2025-08-01T14:00:40.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Did America Get THIS Deep in Debt? (w/ Thomas Massie)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Did America Get THIS Deep in Debt? (w/ Thomas Massie)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-01. Transcript available.

I mean, if we were borrowing money in D.C. to fund the future, I could be for
borrowing money.
The problem is up there, it's not like on my farm where you invest in fences
and you invest in livestock.
In D.C., we're just pissing away the money and living on basically our seed
corn.
We are taking what should be saved for the next generation and spending it now.
Is that how you feel?
Yeah, it's we're robbing the next generation, but it's got so bad.
We're robbing ourselves five years from now.
Right.
It's getting that close.
Yeah.
I've heard you talk about are you talking about the national debt overall?
Okay.
I've heard you talk a lot about it and I see you got your.
This is my my debt badge.
It shows I've got three levels of brightness.
So if you wear it to the movies, you can tone it down and not blind your date.
But okay.
So I got on the brightest level there.
Hopefully your camera can see it.
Yeah.
I wear this every second.
I'm in the House of Representatives.
I wear it in hearings.
I wear it in elevators with Democrats.
They think it's how many steps I've taken.
But I built this using my electrical engineering degree.
I came up with this idea and I built it.
It's got Wi-Fi.
Once a day, it connects to the treasury.gov and calibrates to the penny.
So it's the most accurate debt representation that you can have.
In fact, you know, it's, um, let me make sure.
You're like Mark Zucker Twain.
This, this is, I brought you one as a gift.
Yeah.
Yeah, brother.
So, uh.
Oh, hell yeah, dude.
You can just stare at the numbers, just spinning all day long.
It's, um, it's an, yeah, just clips onto your pocket there.
What kind of woman am I going to meet wearing this though?
Oh, man.
I don't know what kind you've been meeting, but you've really upped your game
with that
thing.
You think?
Yeah.
They're going to think I am way broke.
I had, I had a female congressman staring at my chest, uh, the other day and I
had to
tell her my eyes were up here.
And then she asked if I would make a belt buckle out of it.
Oh, damn, brother.
Yeah.
People want it all nowadays.
People just want to see your damn wiener if they can for free.
Sometimes I'm like, get away from me.
Um, but let's talk about the national debt.
Actually, uh, cause can you explain it to me?
A lot of people don't even understand the national debt.
We hear about it.
What is the amount right now too?
Well, we don't even really know.
I mean, this is the regime number.
The one that treasury publishes is 36.2 trillion, roughly.
A trillion dollars.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now you see this one online.
Uh-huh.
It's not that accurate.
Like it's off by a few hundred billion.
We, we were shipping these debt clocks.
I don't make them, but my son-in-law makes them and sells them.
And he had somebody go online and find this debt counter and say, oh, you sold
me a faulty
debt badge.
And he's like, no, it's ours calibrates with treasury every day.
It's so sad that we can't even get a deal.
Even our debt clock doesn't even, it's like, at least invest in the fucking
clock that
shows the debt, right?
Well, what they might be trying to do there online is anticipate when we lift
the debt
limit, like right now we've hit the debt limit.
So it's stuck at $36.2 trillion.
Every day they sort of reset the number until Congress raises the debt limit.
Now you say, how did they do that?
Well, they start selling off the postal workers pension fund.
They take the money that's been saved up to pay your postman his retirement,
and they use
that to fund other parts of the government.
They can only do that for a few months.
And that's what we've been doing for, you know, the first six months of this
presidency.
And pretty soon we're going to run out of all those extra things we can spend.
That we're leveraging, basically?
Yeah, we're leveraging all that.
And they're going to have to pay it all back.
So we're really probably are closer to $36.6 or $36.8 trillion.
And but is that a common practice, like leveraging like pensions or I don't
want to say like
Medicaid and Medicare.
They're not leveraging that, right?
Oh, anything they can get their hands on.
They liquidate it.
And they spend it, for instance, to buy bombs and send them overseas.
All that deficit spending right now is not funded by treasury bonds.
All the new deficit spending is funded by, you know, the trust funds that have
been established
that might have money in them.
Okay.
I'm a little confused on that.
Well, it's like this, Theo.
Let's say you saved up for your kid's college.
They've been going to college and you got enough to pay the next semester of
college.
But your credit card comes in and your credit card gets canceled.
So instead of renewing your credit card, you just spend your kid's, you know,
next tranche
of tuition or something.
But you got to find that money before the next semester comes back or else they
get kicked
out of school.
Okay.
And so how do we find that money?
Like, because obviously we repeatedly.
Well, Congress is going to pass a law here in the next few weeks and they're
just going
to say, oh, well, there's no debt limit.
It's now $5 trillion higher than what we said.
They move the limit up.
They move the limit up.
They get a new credit card.
They go out.
They start borrowing new money to pay off the money they borrowed.
And it's a vicious cycle.
Got it.
And it's obviously it's a cycle that we've been in for a long time.
I think to the point where like the national debt doesn't even make sense to
people.
Right.
It's like, here's my question is, who do we owe the money to?
Some of it is owed to institutional investors like the big banks in the United
States.
Some of it is owed to sovereign wealth funds like China, Japan, other countries
that buy
our debt for us.
And it's and here's here's the problem right now.
They're telling us we don't want to buy your debt at 2 percent or 3 percent or
4 percent.
We want at least 5 percent return.
And so everybody thinks the Federal Reserve is setting interest rates.
You know, there's all this discussion.
Will the Fed raise the rate?
Will the Fed lower the rate?
The reality right now is the Fed can't do much because if they lower the rate
to, let's
say, 4 percent, the that and try to tell people to buy our debt at 4 percent,
the people who
normally buy our debt, those foreign countries and those institutional
investors are saying
you're not a good investment at 4 percent.
We want 5 percent.
And that's that's a big problem because just to put it in perspective, you know,
let's let's
round this number.
Remember, if it were $30 trillion and we were paying 5 percent, that's that's
that is
$16,000 per family.
I've already done the math.
I'm not doing all that in my head right now, but it's $16,000 per family of
interest that
we are paying.
Got it.
So when you pay your taxes for your family, the first $16,000 goes to nothing
except for
the interest that's paid to those foreign countries and to the big bankers.
But we're never going to defeat this number.
You know, we might get in a situation like Puerto Rico got into a few years ago
where the
people said we're just not loaning you anymore.
And you know what happens that day?
It's actually kind of a it'll be scary for a lot of people.
For me, it would be a good day because that's the day we have to balance the
budget.
When people say we're not going to loan you any more money, you're not a good
investment.
We don't trust that you'll pay it back.
That is the day that you can only spend as much money as you take in on any
given week.
And are a lot of people in Congress aware of this and like battling it?
Or it just seems like it's almost seems like we don't even hear about like it
seems like
it's one of those things you hear about during the election cycle.
And that's about it.
You know, like we're going to balance the budget and it never happened.
No one ever balances the budget.
Like, do you think anyone, either one of these parties even want to balance the
budget?
No, they're not serious about it.
It's why I built the debt badge to like shove it in their face every day.
And it's still they're still not concerned about it.
I mean, they're a little bit concerned, but as long as they can get reelected,
they're not
that concerned.
Right.
And I don't blame them for all of it.
I blame the American people who keep reelecting people who because they tell
them you can have
these things and it won't cost anything.
So I hear people talk about like mass deportations and there's 100 billion to DHS
and 50 billion
to DOJ to do mass deportations.
Well, we know we it's not, it doesn't cost that whatever Trump has intended to
do.
It's not going to cost $150 billion, but people say, I don't care what it costs.
And the reason they say, I don't care what it costs is they don't think they're
paying
it.
Yeah.
They don't care what anything costs.
They don't care what war in the Middle East costs because they don't see that
they're
paying it.
Well, it's all gotten so confusing.
And when you, when you start with communication with people, even on a
financial front of this
hogwartsy and number, when you start, cause we all learn basic math in school.
Some of us learn algebra, some of us going to learn some higher maths.
Right.
Um, but the, when you, when you starting with this, we, the regular person
doesn't know where
to begin.
You feel literally like numerically defeated out of the gate.
Right.
The average person, because it's like, how, what do you do?
It's impossible.
So it, this sets everything up with impossibility.
Right.
So I think that's why we've gotten so far, we've gotten, you know, two
generations now
into complete impossibility of, uh, of, of numerical reality when it comes to
even having
some of the discussions.
I think, does that make any sense?
No, that makes sense.
It's virtual reality.
Uh, right.
You did the last five digits on this deck counter.
Uh, they change about $80,000 a second.
That's like a cyber truck being launched into the ocean every second.
Like boom, boom, boom, boom.
That's how much debt we're taking on.
Well, so the, I hope the new model looks a little bit different.
I, I have a cyber truck, but, and the, yeah.
And the model.
Let's put my camper in it.
Oh, I don't know if we can fit it in there.
I don't think so.
That's why I have it.
F-250.
Dude.
Yeah.
I think I need to get something that fucking, I want something that it feels
like it'll,
you'll burn to death when you hit something.
You know what I'm saying?
That's what I like about something that's got some real fuel in it.
Let's, let's talk, since we're talking about debt, let's talk a little bit
about the, uh,
the big, beautiful bill, right?
Yeah.
And it, you, you oppose it.
Yeah.
Right.
And there's reasons that I've learned recently that I oppose it.
I don't know a ton of them, but there's, I know some of my reasons, but I don't
know
what everything that's in the bill.
Um, why are you against it?
Because, um, it's, well, it's, it's not going to be a big deal.
It's not going to help our debt.
No, that that's the first big lie that's told about the big, beautiful bill.
You can finagle the numbers.
The big, beautiful bill looks at a 10 year spending window.
Okay.
And what it does is in the next five years, it's going to add to the deficit.
Like nobody disputes that even the number crunchers that work for the president
know
that's going to happen.
What they're claiming is five years from now, it will start to break even and
reduce the
deficit.
Uh, the problem is the people I serve with, a lot of them aren't going to be
there five
years from now.
Right.
The president Trump's not going to be there five years from now.
This big, beautiful bill doesn't force people five years from now to do that.
It suggests that they should do that.
And it will do that unless somebody does something different, but they're going
to do something
different five years from now.
We'll get to that point.
And they'll say, oh my gosh, that Congress five years ago set up a fiscal cliff.
We're going to be hit with tax increases on seniors.
We're going to be hit with tax on tips.
We're going to be hit with tax on overtime.
We're, oh my gosh, the military is not going to get as much money as it got
last year.
We got to do something about this.
And so what they'll do is they'll cut taxes again and they'll increase spending
again.
And this deficit will never go down.
And I'm not even talking about the debt.
The deficit is how much you add to the debt every year.
It's about $2 trillion.
It's going to be above $2 trillion next year.
And for as far as the eye can see.
But I got to talk with, uh, uh, JD Vance a couple of weeks ago, and he was
talking about,
but that a lot of what's happening now is still because of the last party that
was in.
Yeah.
And a lot of it's still because of what Trump did when he was in last time.
So I just wondering how far it's, it's, it's tough to like, as a regular person,
it's tough to correlate how far up or downstream you are from whatever,
who was actually responsible for whatever's occurring.
Does that make sense?
It does make sense.
But you know, in 2020, we had COVID hit and they put a $2 trillion spending
bill on the floor.
And they, I was the only one who would oppose it.
I said, this is going to cause, this was Trump was president.
And Pelosi was speaker, but they were working together.
I said, this is going to cause massive inflation.
You're going to have shortages in the stores, and this is going to last for
years.
And the inflation, once it happens, the prices will never go back down.
And that's exactly what happened.
They, they said, Congress of Massey, the president's chief of staff at the time
told me,
he said, it was Mark Meadows, who's a friend of mine.
We both worked together in Congress.
He said, the reason this is $2 trillion is so we don't have to pass another one
of these.
It's just going to be painful once.
Well, guess what?
By the time December rolled around under Trump, we passed another one of these
stimulus packages
that was over a trillion dollars.
And don't forget, people got a $1,200 check the first time, and they got a $600
check the second time.
I told folks, that's the cheese in the trap.
That most of, you know, that $1,200 check, you multiply that times the number
of families in the United States,
it wasn't 5% of the spending in that bill.
Most of that money went to corporations and banks, eventually.
And so, everybody's responsible for it.
Everybody wants to point to the other party for it.
But, you know, it's, I don't want to upset too many people who like wrestling,
but it's like the WWF, okay, or.
Oh, it's felt like this for years.
I think everything is turning into the WWE.
Everything.
It's all, it's all like optics and the way things are shot and this is out
there and this is what you believe.
It's like interviews that are just to get the hype and then they offstage,
they're all in the, you know, in the locker room,
like, you know, rubbing GHB on each other's backs and stuff like that and gramming
out.
Let me.

How Did America Get THIS Deep in Debt? (w/ Thomas Massie)

I mean, if we were borrowing money in D.C. to fund the future, I could be for
borrowing money.
The problem is up there, it's not like on my farm where you invest in fences
and you invest in livestock.
In D.C., we're just pissing away the money and living on basically our seed
corn.
We are taking what should be saved for the next generation and spending it now.
Is that how you feel?
Yeah, it's we're robbing the next generation, but it's got so bad.
We're robbing ourselves five years from now.
Right.
It's getting that close.
Yeah.
I've heard you talk about are you talking about the national debt overall?
Okay.
I've heard you talk a lot about it and I see you got your.
This is my my debt badge.
It shows I've got three levels of brightness.
So if you wear it to the movies, you can tone it down and not blind your date.
But okay.
So I got on the brightest level there.
Hopefully your camera can see it.
Yeah.
I wear this every second.
I'm in the House of Representatives.
I wear it in hearings.
I wear it in elevators with Democrats.
They think it's how many steps I've taken.
But I built this using my electrical engineering degree.
I came up with this idea and I built it.
It's got Wi-Fi.
Once a day, it connects to the treasury.gov and calibrates to the penny.
So it's the most accurate debt representation that you can have.
In fact, you know, it's, um, let me make sure.
You're like Mark Zucker Twain.
This, this is, I brought you one as a gift.
Yeah.
Yeah, brother.
So, uh.
Oh, hell yeah, dude.
You can just stare at the numbers, just spinning all day long.
It's, um, it's an, yeah, just clips onto your pocket there.
What kind of woman am I going to meet wearing this though?
Oh, man.
I don't know what kind you've been meeting, but you've really upped your game
with that
thing.
You think?
Yeah.
They're going to think I am way broke.
I had, I had a female congressman staring at my chest, uh, the other day and I
had to
tell her my eyes were up here.
And then she asked if I would make a belt buckle out of it.
Oh, damn, brother.
Yeah.
People want it all nowadays.
People just want to see your damn wiener if they can for free.
Sometimes I'm like, get away from me.
Um, but let's talk about the national debt.
Actually, uh, cause can you explain it to me?
A lot of people don't even understand the national debt.
We hear about it.
What is the amount right now too?
Well, we don't even really know.
I mean, this is the regime number.
The one that treasury publishes is 36.2 trillion, roughly.
A trillion dollars.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now you see this one online.
Uh-huh.
It's not that accurate.
Like it's off by a few hundred billion.
We, we were shipping these debt clocks.
I don't make them, but my son-in-law makes them and sells them.
And he had somebody go online and find this debt counter and say, oh, you sold
me a faulty
debt badge.
And he's like, no, it's ours calibrates with treasury every day.
It's so sad that we can't even get a deal.
Even our debt clock doesn't even, it's like, at least invest in the fucking
clock that
shows the debt, right?
Well, what they might be trying to do there online is anticipate when we lift
the debt
limit, like right now we've hit the debt limit.
So it's stuck at $36.2 trillion.
Every day they sort of reset the number until Congress raises the debt limit.
Now you say, how did they do that?
Well, they start selling off the postal workers pension fund.
They take the money that's been saved up to pay your postman his retirement,
and they use
that to fund other parts of the government.
They can only do that for a few months.
And that's what we've been doing for, you know, the first six months of this
presidency.
And pretty soon we're going to run out of all those extra things we can spend.
That we're leveraging, basically?
Yeah, we're leveraging all that.
And they're going to have to pay it all back.
So we're really probably are closer to $36.6 or $36.8 trillion.
And but is that a common practice, like leveraging like pensions or I don't
want to say like
Medicaid and Medicare.
They're not leveraging that, right?
Oh, anything they can get their hands on.
They liquidate it.
And they spend it, for instance, to buy bombs and send them overseas.
All that deficit spending right now is not funded by treasury bonds.
All the new deficit spending is funded by, you know, the trust funds that have
been established
that might have money in them.
Okay.
I'm a little confused on that.
Well, it's like this, Theo.
Let's say you saved up for your kid's college.
They've been going to college and you got enough to pay the next semester of
college.
But your credit card comes in and your credit card gets canceled.
So instead of renewing your credit card, you just spend your kid's, you know,
next tranche
of tuition or something.
But you got to find that money before the next semester comes back or else they
get kicked
out of school.
Okay.
And so how do we find that money?
Like, because obviously we repeatedly.
Well, Congress is going to pass a law here in the next few weeks and they're
just going
to say, oh, well, there's no debt limit.
It's now $5 trillion higher than what we said.
They move the limit up.
They move the limit up.
They get a new credit card.
They go out.
They start borrowing new money to pay off the money they borrowed.
And it's a vicious cycle.
Got it.
And it's obviously it's a cycle that we've been in for a long time.
I think to the point where like the national debt doesn't even make sense to
people.
Right.
It's like, here's my question is, who do we owe the money to?
Some of it is owed to institutional investors like the big banks in the United
States.
Some of it is owed to sovereign wealth funds like China, Japan, other countries
that buy
our debt for us.
And it's and here's here's the problem right now.
They're telling us we don't want to buy your debt at 2 percent or 3 percent or
4 percent.
We want at least 5 percent return.
And so everybody thinks the Federal Reserve is setting interest rates.
You know, there's all this discussion.
Will the Fed raise the rate?
Will the Fed lower the rate?
The reality right now is the Fed can't do much because if they lower the rate
to, let's
say, 4 percent, the that and try to tell people to buy our debt at 4 percent,
the people who
normally buy our debt, those foreign countries and those institutional
investors are saying
you're not a good investment at 4 percent.
We want 5 percent.
And that's that's a big problem because just to put it in perspective, you know,
let's let's
round this number.
Remember, if it were $30 trillion and we were paying 5 percent, that's that's
that is
$16,000 per family.
I've already done the math.
I'm not doing all that in my head right now, but it's $16,000 per family of
interest that
we are paying.
Got it.
So when you pay your taxes for your family, the first $16,000 goes to nothing
except for
the interest that's paid to those foreign countries and to the big bankers.
But we're never going to defeat this number.
You know, we might get in a situation like Puerto Rico got into a few years ago
where the
people said we're just not loaning you anymore.
And you know what happens that day?
It's actually kind of a it'll be scary for a lot of people.
For me, it would be a good day because that's the day we have to balance the
budget.
When people say we're not going to loan you any more money, you're not a good
investment.
We don't trust that you'll pay it back.
That is the day that you can only spend as much money as you take in on any
given week.
And are a lot of people in Congress aware of this and like battling it?
Or it just seems like it's almost seems like we don't even hear about like it
seems like
it's one of those things you hear about during the election cycle.
And that's about it.
You know, like we're going to balance the budget and it never happened.
No one ever balances the budget.
Like, do you think anyone, either one of these parties even want to balance the
budget?
No, they're not serious about it.
It's why I built the debt badge to like shove it in their face every day.
And it's still they're still not concerned about it.
I mean, they're a little bit concerned, but as long as they can get reelected,
they're not
that concerned.
Right.
And I don't blame them for all of it.
I blame the American people who keep reelecting people who because they tell
them you can have
these things and it won't cost anything.
So I hear people talk about like mass deportations and there's 100 billion to DHS
and 50 billion
to DOJ to do mass deportations.
Well, we know we it's not, it doesn't cost that whatever Trump has intended to
do.
It's not going to cost $150 billion, but people say, I don't care what it costs.
And the reason they say, I don't care what it costs is they don't think they're
paying
it.
Yeah.
They don't care what anything costs.
They don't care what war in the Middle East costs because they don't see that
they're
paying it.
Well, it's all gotten so confusing.
And when you, when you start with communication with people, even on a
financial front of this
hogwartsy and number, when you start, cause we all learn basic math in school.
Some of us learn algebra, some of us going to learn some higher maths.
Right.
Um, but the, when you, when you starting with this, we, the regular person
doesn't know where
to begin.
You feel literally like numerically defeated out of the gate.
Right.
The average person, because it's like, how, what do you do?
It's impossible.
So it, this sets everything up with impossibility.
Right.
So I think that's why we've gotten so far, we've gotten, you know, two
generations now
into complete impossibility of, uh, of, of numerical reality when it comes to
even having
some of the discussions.
I think, does that make any sense?
No, that makes sense.
It's virtual reality.
Uh, right.
You did the last five digits on this deck counter.
Uh, they change about $80,000 a second.
That's like a cyber truck being launched into the ocean every second.
Like boom, boom, boom, boom.
That's how much debt we're taking on.
Well, so the, I hope the new model looks a little bit different.
I, I have a cyber truck, but, and the, yeah.
And the model.
Let's put my camper in it.
Oh, I don't know if we can fit it in there.
I don't think so.
That's why I have it.
F-250.
Dude.
Yeah.
I think I need to get something that fucking, I want something that it feels
like it'll,
you'll burn to death when you hit something.
You know what I'm saying?
That's what I like about something that's got some real fuel in it.
Let's, let's talk, since we're talking about debt, let's talk a little bit
about the, uh,
the big, beautiful bill, right?
Yeah.
And it, you, you oppose it.
Yeah.
Right.
And there's reasons that I've learned recently that I oppose it.
I don't know a ton of them, but there's, I know some of my reasons, but I don't
know
what everything that's in the bill.
Um, why are you against it?
Because, um, it's, well, it's, it's not going to be a big deal.
It's not going to help our debt.
No, that that's the first big lie that's told about the big, beautiful bill.
You can finagle the numbers.
The big, beautiful bill looks at a 10 year spending window.
Okay.
And what it does is in the next five years, it's going to add to the deficit.
Like nobody disputes that even the number crunchers that work for the president
know
that's going to happen.
What they're claiming is five years from now, it will start to break even and
reduce the
deficit.
Uh, the problem is the people I serve with, a lot of them aren't going to be
there five
years from now.
Right.
The president Trump's not going to be there five years from now.
This big, beautiful bill doesn't force people five years from now to do that.
It suggests that they should do that.
And it will do that unless somebody does something different, but they're going
to do something
different five years from now.
We'll get to that point.
And they'll say, oh my gosh, that Congress five years ago set up a fi