“They killed America a long time ago, it’s just looting the corpse at this point.”
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The debt is simply unpayable. Its $250K per taxpayer, and rapidly rising. And unfunded liabilities are approaching the $200 trillion mark.
An economic day of reckoning is coming.
The debt was never going to be paid back, and it will never be paid back, that isn’t the issue.
Governments don’t do that. There is in fact no reason to do so. They “roll over” their existing debt, by purchasing new bonds, extinguishing debt, and all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery like open market operations and things that I don’t claim to understand.
What they DO have to do, is make timely interest payments on the existing debt. That is not negotiable. Historically governments had long duration debt, one of the things they did in the 1990s was basically re-finance all the debt into short term duration paper. This meant the government could borrow at near zero rates.
BUT, it also means that the entire national government debt, all $32 Trillion of it, rolls over every 4 years or so. If you pencil it out even roughly it quickly becomes obvious that normalized interest rates of 4% to 8% quickly puts the hurt on and chews up the lions share of tax revenue.
Anything higher than that is game over. TILT. So it looks to me like they painted themselves into a corner a long time ago. Supposedly they can sell off assets on their balance sheet, but that looks like a bunch of crap they bought at par that nobody else was dumb enough to buy in the first place. A lot of this crap isn’t the first bite at the apple either. Social Security was rolled into the general budget in 1968 - and Fannie Mae was offloaded onto the taxpayers that year as well.
Ida Mae Fuller beneficiary #1 paid in $40 to Social Security or whatever, and withdrew $22,000 in “benefits”. So everyone who can add and subtract knew at some point it would unravel.
You’ll sometimes hear the usual suspects claim that’s what is so good and necessary about “open borders” - a steady stream of low wage replacement workers, who are no doubt drawn to the US by promises they will be required to support retired Americans in their old age.
Sure, Jan. Sure.