Posted on 01/23/2023 6:14:17 AM PST by Red Badger
You can call everyone for dinner, because our goose is cooked. We are so deep in debt that the only way we can keep the entire system from collapsing is to keep borrowing even more money. Perhaps you have been through a similar scenario with your own personal finances. When you simply do not have enough money to pay your bills, borrowing more money can seem like a really easy short-term solution. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has been doing this for decades, and now our national debt spiral has reached a terminal stage.
Even if we gathered up all of the money that exists in every bank account in America, we could not pay off the national debt. The debt level is exploding upwards at an exponential rate, and the only way that the federal government can continue to pay the bills is to keep borrowing and spending colossal mountains of money that we must borrow from someone else.
As I write this article, the U.S. national debt is sitting at 31.4 trillion dollars.
But the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year was only about 25 trillion dollars.
Our leaders in Washington could try to reverse course by balancing the budget, but that would lead to a short-term economic disaster.
Just think about it. What do you think would happen if a couple trillion dollars of government spending was suddenly sucked out of the economy?
We would immediately plunge into a horrifying economic depression. Sadly, the truth is that we have been borrowing from the future to make the present a lot more pleasant. We are enjoying an artificially-inflated standard of living that we do not deserve, and we have been using debt to fund that artificially-inflated standard of living.
But now a day of reckoning is here. Of course it isn’t just the federal government that has gone completely insane. Our state and local governments are collectively more than 3 trillion dollars in debt. Corporate debt in the United States has now surpassed the 12 trillion dollar mark.
And total U.S. household debt is now over 18 trillion dollars.
As the U.S. economy has slowed down in recent months, an increasing number of Americans have turned to credit card debt. So now credit card debt is rising at an exponential rate while the savings rate has dropped to a historic low. And at this point the average rate of interest on credit card balances is the highest ever.
I don’t even have the words to describe how self-destructive we are being. On every level of society, debt levels are absolutely skyrocketing.
We are literally committing national financial suicide, but many people don’t seem to care. And many people don’t seem to care because they don’t even understand what is happening.
At this point, our “system of education” has produced hordes of completely clueless individuals that can barely even function in a modern society.
If we had a population that was properly educated and properly informed, they would be absolutely horrified by what our leaders have been doing to us.
But instead, our leaders have been free to systematically destroy our financial future for a very long time, and very few of us have even cared enough to object.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point where there is no turning back. We have already destroyed the reserve currency of the planet. We have already created rampant inflation.
The Federal Reserve has been feverishly hiking interest rates, but that is dramatically raising debt service costs at every level of our society, and it is also causing economic activity to slow down all around us.
Companies all over America are now laying off workers, and that even includes Google…
On Friday, Alphabet-owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 employees, roughly 6% of the full-time workforce. While employees had been bracing for a potential layoff, they are questioning leadership about the criteria for layoffs which surprised some employees, who woke up to find their access to company properties cut off. Some of the laid-off employees had been long-tenured or recently promoted, raising questions about the criteria used to decide whose jobs were cut.
Shortly after CEO Sundar Pichai’s initial email to employees Friday morning, Google’s search boss Prabhakar Raghavan sent an email to employees saying he “also feels the responsibility to reach out” and asking for them to save questions for next week’s town hall. There will be “bumps in the road” as the organization moves forward with the layoffs, Raghavan noted.
Why is Google doing this?
No corporation in the entire country is stronger than they are.
If there is one company in America that should not be laying off workers, it is Google.
Of course just about every large tech company is laying off workers these days.
Microsoft is laying off workers. Amazon is laying off workers. Facebook is laying off workers. Twitter is laying off workers.
We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, and that is because we haven’t had an economic crisis like this since 2008.
So many people are going to lose their jobs in the months ahead.
And the economic pain that we will experience in 2023 will be just the beginning, because the entire system is starting to come down all around us.
Did you actually think that we could go on the greatest debt binge in all of human history and that everything would work out just fine somehow?
That is not how the real world works.
We sat by and did nothing while our leaders made disastrous decisions for decades, and now we will be forced to watch in horror as the consequences of those decisions play out right in front of our eyes.
Sorry, but the US is not insolvent. This kind of nonsense has deluded conservatives for too long. It’s gotta stop. There are bigger issues than this stuff. There are so many other issues that deserve center stage other than this phony, Chamber of Commerce “issue”.
The best advice anyone ever gave me was, “Avoid debt”. Sometimes I think I live like a miser, but I am both personally frugal and generous to family.
But what a hell of a toboggan ride to the bottom!
“Our leaders in Washington could try to reverse course by balancing the budget, but that would lead to a short-term economic disaster.
Just think about it. What do you think would happen if a couple trillion dollars of government spending was suddenly sucked out of the economy?
We would immediately plunge into a horrifying economic depression.”
At least he is honest about what a balanced budget would do in the short term.
“CEO Sundar Pichai”
“Google’s search boss Prabhakar Raghavan”
Making room for more fellow countrymen?
Neither a borrower nor a lender be...........Shakespeare.............
It’s not just the us. It is civilization as we know it.
The US government borrows money from the Federal Reserve, which has computers that conjure it up.
The real impact is on the inflation they are generating. They are trying to minimize the burden of 3% debt by creating 7% to 10% inflation.
Anybody that has money in a CD or savings account is getting cheated out the value of their savings.
The main alternative is to buy stock in companies, most of which are still overvalued.
Are these people really that good at their jobs? Seems like just about every CEO, COO, Cxx is from the subcontinent or at least has that name.
I sort of get depressed every time a store raises a price.
Every person with dollar-based financial accounts in the USA is going through a depression in the value of their money.
In other breaking news: Sun unexpectedly rises in the East.
Some of them are actually smart.
However if a company is laying off 10,000 people it is an indication that lots of bad hiring decisions were made. It is also a sign that other bad decisions were made.
Join the club U.S........... Thanks pols.
In the words of George Reisman, the author of "Capitalism", "A large national debt is a burden on the economy that can lead to inflation, decreased standard of living, and a lack of foreign investment. It also puts a strain on the government's ability to fund necessary programs and can lead to higher interest rates for both the government and private citizens."
Nothin’ a little WW3 won’t take care of
Like me.......................
I surveyed a number of definitions of "insolvency," and think your assertion is essentially false. While one "pays bills" with adding to the aggregate debt is "paying bills" today, it is also amassing ever larger bills to pay tomorrow.
So if one wishes to play with definitions per se, it would be better to say that the federal government is involved in a massive and now multi-generaitonal "check kiting" scheme.
No matter how one makes prose -- language to replace numbers and graphs -- the prose cannot wipe away some simple observations. The largest of these is the well-tested "extend the curve" in terms of the graphs posted by Red Badger.
How does Bishop Malachi extend that graph into the future? With a leveling off? Or a downturn? Or with a continual upward rise soon to become catastrophic?
The normal definition of a Ponzi scheme aka "snowball scheme" and other such fiscal games is to take now and the "last rube in" is stuck with the bill (loss). Insolvency comes at the end of the check kiting or Ponzi scheme, but it comes.
But since everyone else is in hock up their eyeballs like us, that doesn't happen.
I’m typing on a google chromebook because my hand-me-down Mac and Windows 10 machine won’t use USB tethering, but this 10-year-old chromebook does.
This chromebook doesn’t waste half an hour of my time almost every day updating itself unlike some other machine.
This chromebook does have a back menu that appears when I attempt to use the right hand slider bar. It also doesn’t show the slider bars all the time, an annoyance I know how to avoid on my Mac.
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