Trump Is Really Asking People to Venmo to Pay Off the National Debt

The Treasury Department wants you to Venmo it to help with the $36.65 trillion national debt.

On Wednesday, NPR’s Jack Corbett pointed out that there was an option on Pay.gov, the Treasury’s online payment platform, where Americans could go to throw their Venmo dollars at the gargantuan national debt. You can also use PayPal. The page is titled “Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt.”

The Treasury has run this program for years, and people have donated $67.3 million since 1996, a minuscule amount of the total debt. But the options to use Venmo or PayPal are new.

This is an absolute joke. Leaders on both sides of the aisle harangue Americans every day about the specter of the national debt while throwing billions of dollars at funding the military, funding Israel’s military, and funding Trump’s brutal immigration campaign. To even create this option when the majority of the country is working/middle class appears deeply unserious and tone deaf.

And even if people were feeling generous, it would be virtually impossible to make a dent in the debt given its current size and the fact that it is set to keep growing, and fast.