Posted on 08/09/2009 5:35:58 PM PDT by Robert Drobot
Yes. And it isn’t BO’s fault. Underfunded Medicare and Medicaid exceed underfunded social security by a factor of five.
What I think will happen, is that the debt will be monetized and each of us will start getting a Basic Income Grant from the go’vt. We can work if we want to make more. Frankly, the health care trillon is a drop in the bucket.
parsy, who will become a poet in the new America
Sadly, there is plenty of blame to go around. Both parties have been profligate spenders. The fecal material is starting to hit the fan and it will get much smellier before it gets better. To answer the author’s question, I don’t think there are many, if any, in state and local government who are willing to face the facts and stop the slide to financial oblivion. I think it is time for people to prepare for a bumpy ride.
It may not be BO’s fault, but if it were urgent that we get a fiscally responsible administration at this time in our nation’s history ....
cPete, who will let the poet finish the above thought.
bump for later
Then we ain’t got one. But, maybe what we need is an irresponsible leader at this point in our history. Someone who will just go ahead, throw sense to the wind, and do something stupid. I don’t see how brains can fix this.
parsy, who says sometimes brains are a detriment
Some have the objective of minimizing the damage, keeping the country in one piece and waiting/working for the culture to change.
It’s a sad thing for a nation to have a spiritual/cultural revival in the years right after being reduced to rubble.
cPete, who hears people say that “war is hell” and retorts that “national bankruptcy is permanent”.
I don’t know that it can be minimized. I pulled this off wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
An excerpt:
Calculating and projecting the debt
2010 Budget: Projected deficits and debt increases in President Obama’s 2010 Budget
2010 Budget: Total Debt $ and % to GDP
Tracking current levels of debt is a cumbersome but rather straightforward process. Making future projections is much more difficult for a number of reasons. For example, before the September 11, 2001 attacks, the George W. Bush administration projected in the 2002 U.S. budget that there would be a $1.288 trillion surplus from 2001 through 2004.[61] In the 2005 Mid-Session Review, however, this had changed to a projected deficit of $850 billion, a swing of $2.138 trillion.[62] The latter document states that 49 percent of this swing was due to “economic and technical re-estimates”, 29 percent was due to “tax relief”, (mainly the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts), and the remaining 22 percent was due to “war, homeland, and other enacted legislation” (mainly expenditures for the War on Terror, Iraq War, and homeland security).
Projections between different groups will sometimes differ because they make different assumptions. For example, in August 2003, a Congressional Budget Office report projected a $1.4 trillion deficit from 2004 through 2013.[63]
However, a mid-term and long-term joint analysis a month later by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Concord Coalition stated that “In projecting deficits, CBO follows mechanical ‘baseline’ rules that do not allow it to account for the costs of any prospective tax or entitlement legislation, no matter how likely the enactment of such legislation may be.” The analysis added in a proposed tax cut extension and Alternative Minimum Tax reform (enacted by a 2005 act), prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D, enacted in a 2003 act), and further increases in defense, homeland security, international, and domestic spending. According to the report, this “adjusts CBO’s official ten-year projections for more realistic assumptions about the costs of budget policies”, raising the projected deficit from $1.4 trillion to $5 trillion.[64]
The 2010 Budget proposed by President Barack Obama projects significant debt increases.[65][66] The debt is projected to nearly double to $20 trillion by 2015, but is expected to increase to nearly 100% of GDP by 2010 and remain at that level thereafter. These estimates assume real GDP growth (after inflation) ranging from 2.6% to 4.6% annually from 2010 through 2019, which exceeds Blue Chip consensus estimates.[67] Approximately 70% of federal spending is in four categories: Defense, Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt. As of June 2009, Obama’s policies enacted into law were only a minor influence on debt and deficit projections. However, Obama himself has been criticized for not having a realistic plan for addressing the increasing debt.[68]
parsy, who thinks the numbers are so out of whack, money will have to printed
Today, the powers that be are in the know, or are just too incompetent to fix it...and as the author states, and Ive seen many others state, you cant have a group of people that large, make 100% WRONG decisions w/o it being purposeful...
IMO, they KNOW the bridge is about to collapse, and KNOW that a 'million bucks' aint gonna buy a loaf of bread shortly, so they are hedging and leveraging everything towards becoming trillionairs [thats 12 ZEROS] to have some power in the aftermath...
gilbo, who thinks that all the lies of our 'representatives' have sentenced my kids to suffer while I fight for the rebuilding the new USA in Glory to God...
ping, great report on the financial state of the union, kinda long though, only cause the author uses the actual numbers with all the zeros...
I always love reading your signatures Parsy.
Obviously, nobody here is bullish on America. (Somebody must be, cuz the DOW’s been on a run. Fools.)
I guess, by “minimize the damage”, I meant NOT maximizing the damage, which the marxists are trying to do.
I could come up with plenty of solutions for the Medicare nightmare. Newt has ideas galore. But the only ideas that would be considered by congress are the bad ones.
A $70 Trillion unfunded liability is easier to default on than a loan. It is not as if we ever borrowed $70 Trillion from the boomers. From their perspective, the $70 Trillion is an asset, but it is asset that will be liquidated by them at a fraction of today’s face value.
cPete, who knows the West is melting.
Hopefully, the suffering will be short. The sooner the gov’t realizes this isn’t fixable, the sooner we can start to build the New America. If not, we will spend years trying to get the deficit under control, and it just can’t be gotten under control without printing money, IMHO. And, I hope I am wrong.
But think about taxes as a % of GNP. 20% of GNP on top of current taxes would pay off the “little deficit” in five years. Which would break business in this country for 5 years, which would increase the deficit even more.
But that doesn’t touch the “BIG DEFICIT” of unfunded medicare/medicaid or social security. This is anywhere for 50 to 100 trillion from numbers I have read. We may have to have nat’l health care just to survive, because who knows how many of us are even going to be working.
But on the bright side, in the New America, we will probably have time for family again and those of us who want to be poets, will have plenty to write about.
parsy, who shot an arrow in the air, it came down hard into his hair, and would have killed him except that, it was deflected by his tinfoil hat.
Thank you. I think I am starting a trend.
parsy, the fashion plate.
That might be why BO is pushing so hard for nat’l health care. We can be paid with the service rather than the cash. And I try to be cheerful, but these numbers don’t look like something that can be worked out.
I think the longer we try to fool ourselves, the longer we are going to suffer.Plus, there’s some of us that have poems to write and need that monthly gov’t check so we can discover our inner Longfellow.
parsy, who is palely loitering
Soros is funding the euthanasia/suicide movement in U.S. Obama is with him 100% on it. That is the solution that corporate America has come up with.
It will be an ugly scene.
therefore, we must have a serious de populating of 'troublemakers', followed by a re populating of peoples that will appreciate their newfound third world wealth and eagerly idolize them as the creaters and providers of life itself...
gilbo, weeping for our children and the foolishness of the human spirit...
Look for cigarettes to be pushed. And all this healthy living stuff? All that is going to do is increase life spans and eventually increase the health costs anyway.
I still the easy way out is hyper-inflation.
parsy, who says again he hopes he is wrong.
But, OTOH, there is now the internet. It will be more difficult and, unlike the Jews in Germany, we Americans are well-armed.
parsy, who really isn’t scared about that scenario
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