Posted on 05/02/2016 7:14:18 PM PDT by xzins
In the six months that have passed since then-retiring House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cut a budget deal with President Barack Obama that suspended the legal limit on the federal debt until March 15, 2017, the federal debt has increased by more than $1 trillion.
The Senate passed “The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015” with a vote held in the early morning hours of Friday, Oct. 30. Obama signed it on Monday, Nov. 2.
At the close business on Oct. 30, 2015, the total federal debt was $18,152,981,685,747.52. By the close of business on April 28, 2016—the latest date for which the Treasury has published the number--the total federal debt was $19,186,207,744,589.55.
That is an increase of $1,033,226,058,842.03.
On Monday, Nov. 2--the day Obama signed the Bipartisan Budget Act and thus suspended the debt limit--the debt took a big leap. It closed that day at $18,492,091,120,833.99—up $339,109,435,086.47 from its $18,152,981,685,747.52 closing on Friday, Oct. 30.
Prior to that, the part of the federal debt subject to the then-legal limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35 had been frozen just below that limit for more than seven months (from March 13, 2015 through Oct. 30, 2015), during a “debt issuance suspension period” that Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had declared on March 13, 2015, to push back the date at which the debt limit would be exceeded.
In a July 29, 2015, letter to Speaker Boehner, Lew indicated he was planning to extend the then-ongoing debt issuance suspension period, and explained its basic operations.
“On March 16, 2015, the outstanding debt of the United States reached the statutory limit,” Lew wrote. “As a result, Treasury had to begin employing extraordinary measures to continue to finance the government on a temporary basis. These measures, which we have used in previous debt limit impasses, include a debt issuance suspension period with respect to investment of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and suspension of the daily reinvestment of Treasury securities held by the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan. The debt issuance suspension period currently lasts until July 30. Tomorrow, I expect to extend the debt issuance through October 30.”
According to the official summary of the law, Section 901 of the “Bipartisan Budget Act,” which Congress passed on Oct. 30 and Obama signed Nov. 2, provided that the “public debt limit is suspended through March 15, 2017.”
The $1,033,226,058,842.03 increase in the debt in the six months since then equals approximately $6,828 for each of the 151,320,000 persons whom the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated had a full or part-time job in the United States as of this March.
It is going into logarithmic mode. A runaway freight train.
There is only one way to pay back the debt and one way only. By inflating the dollar and simultaneously running a balanced budget. That’s it. There are not enough programs to cut, the 1% does not have anywhere near the assets and people have no problem letting their grandkids kids pay for their wants.
[No money, no jobs, racial tension, invasion by illegals, and the collapse of a moral society.]
Correct.
[What awaits us is a tremendously painful financial reset that will make the Great Depression look tame by comparison.]
Correct. And, more than likely, war, as nations default.
[Donald Trump is the nation’s only hope of surviving such a catastrophe.]
Even this highly-successful businessman can’t fix it. But he’s still better than Hillary or Bernie by a million miles.
[It is going into logarithmic mode. A runaway freight train.]
That is absolutely correct. Unfortunately. But reality is a harsh mistress.
Even scarier when you factor in the strength of the US dollar. That debt is in US dollars. An incredibly large real value impossible to pay off with austerity alone. Just a matter of how many die in the chaos to follow and how many states will remain in the union.
Correct. Not 10 minutes ago, I explained to someone that we just exceeded, in 6 months, what took the previous 204 years between 1776 and 1980 to amass.
That puts us at approximately 408x those days. And those were the good old days, comparatively-speaking.
And it’s only going to get worse, faster.
They need a new boss.
“Way to go Ryan and the rest of you rats. Killing us and future generations in America. You must be so proud.”
Don’t forget it was George W. Bush, Dennis Hastert, and Bill Frist who slammed the spending accelerator down. They took the Clinton/Gingrich balanced budget and doubled the national debt in 8 years from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Following their example Obama will double the accumulated debt again aided by Ryan, Boehner, and McConnell.
The Republican Party doesn’t know the meaning of fiscal responsibility.
geez.....
And the noose has been tightening. Made a big appearance in the job market. Then the housing market. Then, AIG and Lehman Brothers went boom. Then, the bailouts.....
I never got a bailout of taxpayer cash.
guess we’re ok then, $5T to go.
I suppose Trump wants to turn it around for his kids and grandkids.
I don’t want to inflate the dollar. I was here during the Carter years. It’s a fools’ game. There was one point during Carter, when I’m pretty sure that a 30 year mortgage jumped to 14%.
That’s impossible for most. It kills the building industry dead.
They need a public beating and a few weeks in the stocks.
Higher than that. I earned just over 12%, tax-free, on All-Savers Certificates back then.
But I had little money. So the most I could buy was two $500 certificates. Put $1,000 in 2 total.
I seem to remember there were house loans at 18% or more.
Make it months and years and I’m with ya.
You got it. :>)
Can you imagine an 18% loan.
That’s about a 2000 monthly payment on a 100,000 house.
The government needs to increase the minimum wage nationally to 500 dollars an hour to increase tax receipts.
Lol.
Why stop there?
I was much younger then (Captain Obvious) but I think there were “bad” home loans shooting around 22%.
Of course, I had no idea how all of it played out with the real payments.
A few years ago, I put in an old VHS I had recorded “Magnum P.I.” on when I got back out of college (went back). There was some dealer promoting a new Dodge for about $7,900. And that was the early 1990’s. I had forgotten those prices.
Of course, a Pinto used to be about $3,000. I do remember flipping hamburgers at $1.63 an hour. Worked part-time some weeks. A two-week paycheck, I’d clear $35.
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