U.S. government debt, the debt held by the United States, is now bigger than the actual U.S. economy.

We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that which may have sounded impossible even a few weeks ago,

but is not only realizable, but an imperative necessity. The Welcome to the Socialist Program. I'm your host, Brian Becker. We are happy to have Professor

Richard Wolf join us again for our regular weekly segment

where we talk about the biggest stories related to the economy.

Richard Wolfe is the co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work.

He's the author of many books, including Understanding Capitalism, which is available at

Democracy at Work.Info, Professor Wolfe, welcome back.

Thank you very much, Brian. Glad to be here. Very, very glad to have you once again.

We have a lot of things happening in the world that we've been talking about with you,

Richard, in the past weeks, the Iran War, its impact on the economy, not to mention its impact on human

life in Iran and throughout the Middle East or West Asia. I'm going to talk about with you a

different topic, but it's not an unrelated topic, because we're talking about the national

debt. And given how much the U.S. government spends for military armaments,

for maintaining a massive U.S. military, of millions of people, of spending so much money

for endless war, the U.S. government has now, this is Pete Hexat's own number, said that the U.S.

has spent about $25 billion just on the war against

Iran, the unprovoked war against Iran that began at the end of February. Here's from the Wall

Street Journal. The U.S. national debt now exceeds 100 percent of gross domestic product, crossing a once unthinkable threshold,

on the way towards breaking the record set in the wake of World War II. And of course,

in World War II, the U.S. did everything to militarize the economy to fight a global war.

As of March 31st, the United States publicly held debt was $31.265 trillion, while gross domestic product over the preceding year

...