Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to the Dividendon Cafe in a lot of ways.

It's the first kind of normal Dividendon Cafe of 2024. I do want to do my reminder that earlier in the week,

we released our special Dividendon Cafe annual year ahead, year behind what we call our white

paper. It's available at Dividendant Cafe.com. The video of me walking through it is available at our YouTube channel.

The podcast has that audio there. I think if you want to go to the website, download the PDF.

There's about 20 different charts and everything kind of walking you through what

2023 was and our perspectives going into

2024. So as we're still early enough in the new year and I'm still trying to make sure that

the labor that goes into that project is not in vain. I want to continue mentioning its availability.

But we are moving on to this first normal div cafe. And as markets kind of peter around a little bit after the massively

successful November, December that they enjoyed, I want to go to a little bit more sobering of a topic,

which is a longer term and more structural,

as opposed to the shorter term and more cyclical issues that a lot of people love talking about,

that is government debt, particularly federal government debt.

I could and probably should do a dividend

cafe one of these days about state and local debt. We talk about our governmental debt only in

the context of federal debt all the time, and I'm about do the same thing here today, when in reality,

if you want to view it across the

body politic, you have to actually include municipal debt as well to paint the full picture of how

many future resources are already spoken for in terms of city, county, state, and then federal

obligations. But to make things a little simpler and avoid, let's just say,

...