title:  TIME Magazine Runs Pro-Trump Propaganda Cover, Stuns Everyone With Sheer Stupidity
text: What happened to TIME Magazine? The iconic news periodical has reached what may be an all-time low with a cover so bloated with pro-Trump agitprop that it s astonishing it ever made it off of the editor s desk. Yikes.This week, TIME readers will be greeted with a bright red cover with huge letters proclaiming, as Trump has often said, that America is bankrupt and needs pay off its debt or else face doom. To make the connection to Trump even more explicit, the subtitle is: Make America Solvent Again.The problem, as economists were quick to point out, is that almost everything about this cover is meant to terrify the ignorant and obscure the truth. It s fear-mongering plain-and-simple. It plays right into Trump s hands.New TIME cover addresses the national debt. pic.twitter.com/Ty4wyCBbdV  Joe Perticone (@JoePerticone) April 14, 2016For economists, the cover is mind-numbingly stupid. As Mat Yglesias at Vox carefully explained, there are major problems with every facet of the argument. For starters, given how wealth inequality works, averaging the debt across all Americans is a nonsensical way of calculating how debt-ridden the country is. You don t owe $43,000, and companies and billionaires (like Trump) owe even more.Under the circumstances, it s true that dividing up the debt burden evenly among all households would be an enormous burden on many Americans. But there is no reason to divide the burden up this way. The way the federal government finances things is it collects more money from the people who have more money.There s also the fact that this  debt  is often owed to other Americans. The United States borrows from itself a lot giving the illusion of a deep deficit to foreign powers, when really the money is changing hands within the boundaries of the country the whole time. Part of paying off our debt would include cutting a check to ourselves.But perhaps worst of all,  solvency  doesn t mean what TIME wants you to think it means. The American economy is the most powerful in the world (and has grown a lot since the darkest days of the Great Recession), which means paying our debts hasn t been a problem. In fact, the only time creditors began to panic over America s debt was when Republicans in Congress floated the idea of defaulting on them to prove a political point. The antics earned America a drop in its credit rating   not because creditors believed it couldn t pay, but because they worried Republicans simply wouldn t pay.Unfortunately, none of this is made clear by TIME. Instead, people who glance over to a magazine rack in the coming weeks will see the kind of message that Donald Trump has played up: America is broke and pathetic and needs to be made  great  again with his powers of dealmaking. This is simply not true. And on the flip side, many economists have warned that a Trump presidency would hurl the world into crisis, as he has routinely floated the idea of starting trade wars with countries he doesn t like. An event like that really could have the power to destroy America s economy in a way that would be difficult to ever recover from.By enabling a Trump talking point, TIME owes the country an apology. Scare tactics and misleading information are what Trump does best, and he doesn t need any help from a magazine many people trust.Featured image via Twitter