Twenty Now. Thirty in Three Years. And a Car That Can Drink It. / Consider the Source / A Pause and an Apology
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THE AUGUST 5 MINUTES THE WARNING NOBODY READ / The Art of a Bad Deal / THE STANDARD THAT ONLY POINTS ONE WAY / A Pause and an Apology
On the morning of August 4, at a quarter
to nine, Wall Street bond dealers sat
down in a closed room at the Treasury
Department with the officials who manage
the national debt. They adjourned at
four. The minutes came out the next day.
Almost nobody reported them.
These are not activists. The Treasury
Borrowing Advisory Committee is made
up of senior bond dealers and investors,
the people the government calls when it
needs to raise money. Their job is to say
what the Treasury can actually sell. Their
answer: at the auction sizes Washington
is running now, there is a $1.45 trillion
hole coming in fiscal 2027 and 2028.
That sits on top of a debt of about $39.8
trillion, roughly $286,000 per American
household, a debt no household signed
for. This year the government pays about
$1 trillion in interest alone: more than the
military, more than Medicaid, more than
every veterans’ program combined.
FROM THE MINUTES
RELEASED AUGUST 5
■ At current auction sizes: a $1.45
trillion funding shortfall in fiscal
2027 and 2028.
■ Treasury outlays up $120 billion
(10%), the largest increase of any
department, from interest on a
larger debt.
■ A group of other outlays down
$112 billion (-20%), in part from
lower EPA, FEMA and Commerce
disbursements.
THE TWO NUMBERS NOBODY
QUOTED. Buried in the same minutes:
Treasury’s outlays rose $120 billion this
year, the largest increase of any department,
from interest on a bigger debt. A
few lines later, another group of outlays
fell $112 billion, partly because of reduced
disbursements by the EPA, FEMA
and the Commerce Department, according
to the minutes. Read those two numbers
next to each other.
PAYING THE MORTGAGE WITH A
CREDIT CARD. Why is the hole there?
Because of how the money is borrowed.
A three-month Treasury bill costs about
3.8 percent. A thirty-year bond costs
more than 5 percent. Secretary Scott Bessent
has leaned hard on the cheap short
paper, which this year looks like savings.
THE AUGUST 5 MINUTES
THE WARNING NOBODY READ
On August 4 the government met behind closed doors about its own debt.
The minutes came out on August 5, and almost nobody read them. Here is what they say.
It is the same trick as paying your mortgage
with a credit card and calling the
smaller minimum payment thrift. The
house does not get cheaper, the balance
must be borrowed again and again, and
when the rate moves, it moves on all of it
at once.
WE HAVE SEEN THIS ACCOUNTING
BEFORE. In this publisher’s opinion,
that is not thrift. It is grossly misleading.
In New York, a court went through ten
years of Trump Organization statements
and found the values inflated: an apartment
listed at about three times its real
size, Mar-a-Lago written down as a private
home instead of the club it is. Nobody
forged a document. They picked the
number that looked best. Bessent knows
the name for it: in 2024 he accused Secretary
Yellen of borrowing short to make
the books look good before an election.
Then he took her chair and did it himself.
“These books do not belong to a
family business. They belong to
Uncle Sam, and he cannot hire a
friendlier appraiser.”
NEITHER ONE IS A HOAX. For seventy
years Smokey Bear told us to put out every
fire. We did, and every small burn we
stopped left its fuel on the ground. That
is why the West now burns in fires no
crew can stop. Good forest management
is unglamorous: thin the stand, clear the
brush. Good money management is the
same work: borrow honestly, lock in the
term, pay something down. This administration
calls climate change a hoax and
treats the debt as a problem for whoever
comes next. But a fire does not read the
Federal Register, and an interest payment
does not check the press release.
AND WHEN A FIRE CROWNS. A
ground fire creeps. A crown fire moves
at the speed of the wind, and it does not
bother climbing through the stages it
skipped. Rates do the same. This is not
theory: in January 2022 the average thirty-
year mortgage was 3.22 percent. By
that November, it was 7.08 percent, more
than double in ten months, with no default
and no panic. The record is 18.63
percent, set the week of October 9, 1981,
and rates held above 18 percent for two
straight months.
Today the average is 6.69 percent. On
a $400,000 loan, that is about $2,578 a
month. At the 1981 record, it is $6,234.
Put it the other way: the payment that
buys a $400,000 house today would buy
a $165,000 one. Nobody has to burn your
house down to take it from you.
Your mortgage is priced off the same
curve discussed in those minutes. When
the government must roll trillions in short
paper every few months and buyers demand
more to take it, everything moves
together: the car loan, the credit card, the
business line, the house. That is the wind,
and it arrives in months, not decades.
The government met about this on August
4 and published the warning on August
5. Ask every candidate in November
whether they have read it and who is doing
the thinning.
THE BOOKS BELONG
TO UNCLE SAM, NOT THE
TRUMP ORGANIZATION.
A DEBT IS NOT A HOAX.
NEITHER IS A FIRE. BOTH
ARE HARD TO BEAR!
Start the clock on February 28. Five
months on, count what each side owns.
America’s ledger: at least $37.5 billion in
direct military spending through mid-July,
according to Secretary Hegseth’s own
testimony to lawmakers, with eighteen
service members dead and 624 wounded
as of late July. Moody’s Mark Zandi
estimates the typical household will pay
about $1,000 because of this war; Brown
University’s Climate Solutions Lab puts
the added fuel bill alone at $79.8 billion,
or roughly $609 per household. The Strategic
Petroleum Reserve has been drawn
down by more than 110 million barrels
in twenty-two weeks. Tomahawks and
interceptors will take three to four years
to replace. No congressional vote authorized
any of it.
The stated objective was a nuclear
weapon. None has been recovered, displayed,
or documented. What remains
is an estimated eleven tons of enriched
uranium still in Iranian hands, along with
the know-how and the capacity, while
inspectors are further than ever from returning
to look for it.
Now Iran’s ledger. Tehran was hurt
badly; some estimates put reconstruction
at $300 billion. But read the asset column.
Brent crude went from the mid-$70s
before the conflict to roughly $126 in
April, a four-year high. Export volumes
fell; revenue climbed as oil moved by a
shadow fleet into Chinese refineries at
wartime prices. Analysts credit Tehran
with profiting from oil sales while preserving
its own export artery through
control of the chokepoint.
And now the terms. Under the announced
arrangement with Oman, American
and Israeli vessels are barred from
the Strait of Hormuz outright. Tolls of up
to seven percent of cargo value apply to
everyone else. Fines of twenty percent
apply to violators. Transit is conditioned
on compensation to Iran for war damage.
We bombed a country for five
months, and the settlement on offer
is that we pay them while our own
flag is the one turned away.
That is not peace. It is a franchise agreement,
and Iran holds the franchise.
A strait is not property. It became property
the moment we proved we would
spend $37.5 billion and eighteen American
lives without securing the one thing
we said we were buying.
Washington has rejected those terms,
and Central Command insists the southern
route through Omani waters stays
open. Note the posture: we are now the
party objecting to another country’s
terms for a waterway we went to war to
keep free.
The self-described master dealmaker
paid retail, took delivery of nothing, and
signed the buyer’s name to the seller’s
contract.
THE STANDARD
THAT ONLY POINTS
ONE WAY
Character has become a weapon
aimed outward and a courtesy
extended inward.
WHERE ARE THE ISSUES?
A campaign is a job interview, and the
voter is the employer. Yet applicant after
applicant spends the hour explaining
what is wrong with the other applicants’
marriages while saying almost nothing
about groceries, premiums, interest
rates, or the debt.
President Trump has made this the
house style of American politics. Nicknames
instead of numbers. Insults instead
of estimates. An entire opposition party is
dismissed as dangerous, godless, un-American
communists, a label that requires no
evidence, permits no rebuttal, and solves
nothing at the checkout counter.
But watch what happens when the
accusation lands on an ally. Rep. Max
Miller’s ex-wife has alleged that he threw
scalding water at her, held a gun to her
head, and fractured their daughter’s collarbone.
Miller denies it, has sued her
for defamation, and has now asked the
House Ethics Committee to investigate
the allegations against him. The response
from leadership? A “family matter.” The
key word is “allegation.” The President
called Miller “a good person” and suggested
the families work it out.
“Character is a bludgeon
aimed outward and a courtesy
extended inward.”
Due process is a fine principle. It simply
is not extended to anyone outside the tent.
George Santos pleaded guilty to wire
fraud and identity theft, deceiving donors
and stealing the identities of eleven people,
including members of his own family.
The President commuted the 87-month
sentence after 84 days and erased
$373,750 owed to the victims. The qualification
cited was neither remorse nor
proportionality. It was that Santos could
be counted on to always vote Republican.
That is the failure of the MAGA platform.
It has no standard, only a scoreboard. A
movement that grades a man by his loyalty
to a caucus rather than by his conduct
toward his wife, his child, and his donors
cannot produce policy because policy requires
one rule applied to everyone.
Ask your candidate what they will do.
If the answer is about somebody else’s
flaws, you have your answer.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my opinion
that discovery in this matter is being shaped
by people whose names do not appear in the
case caption. I cannot prove that today, and I
will not tell readers otherwise. I can only tell you
what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents
may themselves have been used by someone
else who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this
defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.
The Art of a Bad Deal
We spent the treasury. Iran acquired the tollbooth.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
The Tale of Two Carts / The Sickness No Medical School Can Cure / Political Solutions Needed, Not Political Retribution / When the President’s Lawyer Becomes the People’s
The Sickness No Medical
School Can Cure
A billion dollars to build healers, while others use
their offices to tear them down.
CHANGE MY MIND
In February 2024, a woman in her nineties stood before a room of medical students in the
Bronx and told them their tuition was gone. Ruth Gottesman had taught at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine since 1968, specializing in learning disabilities, and chaired its board of
trustees. The billion dollars came from her late husband, David, an early investor in Berkshire
Hathaway, who left it to her to spend as she saw fit. She saw fit to make Einstein tuition
free in perpetuity, the largest gift ever made to an American medical school.
Understand what she actually bought. Tuition ran nearly $59,000 a year, and roughly half
of Einstein’s graduates left owing more than $200,000. Debt of that size does not merely burden
a young doctor; it selects her specialty for her. It steers her away from pediatrics, from
primary care, from the clinic in the neighborhood that needs her most and pays her least.
Gottesman did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible and freed them to study,
to research, and to serve.
“She did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible.”
Set that beside the spectacle we now call oversight. Anthony Fauci spent five decades on
HIV, Ebola, and COVID and helped build a program credited with saving millions of lives
abroad. His reward in 2026 was a subpoena and a hearing room designed to produce a referral
rather than an answer.
One American spent a fortune expanding the nation’s capacity to heal. Others use their
offices, their subpoena power, and our money to attack the people who already did.
That is the contrast worth amplifying. A gift like Gottesman’s is not charity; it is infrastructure.
It will outlive every politician currently auditioning outrage for a fundraising list.
Medical school can teach anatomy. It cannot teach gratitude. It can teach pharmacology,
but there is no course in humility, and no prescription for a public official who mistakes
destruction for duty. That sickness is moral, not clinical, and the only known treatment is
administered at the ballot box.
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897),
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar The Tale of Two Carts
You work to fill yours. The President plays beside his.
ON AFFORDABILITY, PRIORITIES,
AND WHO SENDS THE INVOICE
Fifty-two weeks a year, Americans push a steel cart down an aisle and do arithmetic.
Ground beef runs about $6.75 a pound. Fresh vegetables are up 11.9 percent, tomatoes 32
percent, and lettuce nearly 25 percent. Groceries cost roughly 30 percent more than they did
before the pandemic. Households drop the roast, buy the chicken, and move on.
Notice what fills that cart. A shift. A double. Overtime that was supposed to go toward the
truck payment. Every item in it was purchased with somebody’s hours, hours traded away
and never returned. That is the honest arrangement most Americans live under: you work,
and then you eat.
THE PRESIDENT’S CARTS ARE PROCURED.
The ledger: $765,425 in Secret Service golf-cart rentals during his first term. $95,250 for a
single Bedminster season in 2019. Then, on June 3, 2025, came a contract with Associates Golf
Car Service worth up to $550,930, plus $80,385 for portable toilets, renewable to $333,801.
Behind him rolls “Golf Force One,” an armored Polaris Ranger that the General Services
Administration prices near $190,000. The unarmored version sells for about $20,000.
And in 2018, his own Turnberry resort billed the taxpayers $923 to rent carts to the agents
guarding him.
The larger tab: $151.5 million in term one. Nearly $115 million already in term two, on pace
for $300 million, with 112 days on his own courses, more than a quarter of his days in office.
“One cart is filled by labor.
The other is followed by an armored escort at $190,000 a copy.”
WHAT THIS IS NOT ABOUT
It is not about security. Agents must protect the President, and after two attempts on his
life, one of them on a golf course, the hardware is defensible on its face. That duty is not optional,
and this page will not pretend otherwise.
It is about venue and profit. He chooses to be protected at properties he owns, which
means the government rents, hauls, and staffs its way onto his balance sheet. Every fairway
is a cost center billed to people counting coupons at the register.
THE ARITHMETIC OF IT
A family that overspends on groceries eats less. A President who overspends on golf carts
sends the invoice to the family. One cart is earned. The other is expensed.
So ask your candidate, in public and on the record, to defend the invoice. Not the man.
The invoice. Political Solutions Needed,
Not Political Retribution
An endorsement used to be a recommendation.
It has become a loyalty oath.
There was a time when a party’s backing meant a candidate had been measured for
judgment, competence, and the ability to fix something. That standard is gone. Today the
“MAGA” or “Trump” endorsement certifies exactly one qualification: obedience. In my
opinion, it is a badge of dishonor, and a vote cast for it is a vote to enable conduct that in any
other American workplace would end a career.
Look at what the endorsement now guarantees. Not a health care plan. Not a budget. Not
a border solution written into law rather than announced from a podium. What it guarantees
is a candidate who will call every Democrat a communist, blame a predecessor who left
office years ago, insult a reporter, and go home having solved nothing. The vocabulary is
retribution. The vocabulary of governing, including appropriation, oversight, compromise,
and arithmetic, has been discarded as weakness.
This is not conservatism. Conservatism had a fiscal argument. It had a federalism argument.
It produced people who could read a balance sheet. What replaced it is a class of political
opportunists with no measurable ability, promoted for volume rather than skill, who
mistake grievance for a platform and cruelty for courage.
“A man who can only name an enemy is telling
you he cannot name a solution.”
And the tarnish runs from the top down. A convicted felon sits atop the ticket, and men
and women who once claimed to revere the rule of law now defend, excuse, and pardon on
command. Silence inside that line is not neutrality. It is participation. When you stand in a
party’s column, you accept its implied association, and you own what is done in your name.
I do not ask any reader to become a Democrat. I have never been one. I ask something
harder: demand a solution before you surrender a vote. Ask what they will build, not who
they will punish. Ask for the bill number. Ask for the math.
Retribution is not a policy. It is an admission that you have none. When the President’s Lawyer
Becomes the People’s
The Senate Judiciary Committee has sent Todd Blanche to the
floor. The only question left is whether fifty senators will pretend
the conflict of interest isn’t there.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 Tuesday to advance Todd Blanche, Donald
Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, toward confirmation as Attorney General.
Read that again. The man who sat beside the defendant is to become the lawyer for all of us.
Every first-year law student learns to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. What
Blanche has assembled is not an appearance. As acting Attorney General, he signed the
order declaring the IRS “forever barred” from pursuing prior tax claims against his former
client, that client’s family, and that client’s companies, resolving a $10 billion suit Trump
filed against his own government, in which Blanche’s Justice Department was nominally
the opposing party. A federal judge questioned whether the case had two genuine sides. It
didn’t. It had one man on both.
Then came the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”: $1.776 billion in Treasury money, overseen
by a board the acting Attorney General himself would appoint, to pay those who felt persecuted
by their government. Pardoned January 6 rioters were among the potential claimants.
“A nominee purchased his confirmation by giving back money
he should never have reached for, and the Senate accepted
the refund as a character reference.”
Facing lost votes, Blanche rescinded the fund Sunday night. Senators Cornyn and Tillis,
both leaving Congress and both driven out by Trump, pronounced themselves satisfied
and voted yes. Grasp that. A nominee purchased his confirmation by giving back money he
should never have reached for, and the Senate accepted the refund as a character reference.
Trump says he would revive it if Blanche is blocked. The audit shield remains. Scholars warn
that a later order could resurrect the fund overnight.
The obscenity is not the amendment. It is that one was needed at all. A serious chamber
haggled over the price instead of rejecting the nomination outright.
TWO REMEDIES, BOTH HELD BY CITIZENS
Citizens hold two remedies. Keep the roll call. Every senator who votes yes owns this, and
elections exist for exactly that. Ask them at town halls whether the Attorney General serves
the country or the client.
Then write the New York bar. Blanche’s license came from a state, not from Donald
Trump. Ask the grievance committee whether a lawyer may hand his client a federal absolution
paid out of the Treasury, and whether that license should survive the answer. A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway. My view is that the company and its agents
may themselves have been used by someone else who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.