Go to the phones now - call your congressmen and senators.....tell them there can be no more money for Obama to spend and demand an accounting of where the other bailout $$$$$ etc. have gone. How much did the unions get for starters. Obama is slathered in cronyism.
It’s just another one of Bozo’s accomplishments! He must be proud.
Using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) instead of phony premises, counting all government debt and not just the Federal balance (i.e. states and local governments), counting the GSE guarantees (government sponsored entities such as Fanny, Freddie, Sally, FDIC, FHA, etc.) and unwinding some of the Fed's policies, yields the staggering total of $100 trillion to $250 trillion depending on who is preparing the estimate.
There is no way this country can ever amortize that total with taxes ... no matter how much the economy eventually recovers!
Sometime, pick up an economic history text and read what happens to countries who default on their debt obligations either through hyperinflation or through repudiation. It's not pretty!
Such progress!!! (Sarcasm)
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
It’s a nice sound bite but a nearly meaningless statistic.
Why compare the total debt to the ANNUAL economic output? One year is an arbitrary length of time. Why not compare to the monthly GDP, or the 10-year GDP, or any other arbitrary period?
If the debt was all due in one year, the comparison might make sense. But the debt consists of a huge number of individual obligations, which are due at many different dates varying from tomorrow to many years from now.
A $20 trillion debt due in June would be a much bigger problem than a $20 trillion debt due in 500 years. The real problem is somewhere in between.
The debt is too big, but comparing the total debt to the annual GDP is a very weak argument to explain why.
And nobody thinks there’s a crash coming. How could that possibly happen in America?
Ping
The election year ads against Obama are writing themselves.
A rock could beat Obama in 2012, so long as that rock ran on the economy as a referendum about Obama’s inept economic policies.
I am fully confident that the GOP can still lose to Obama by avoiding all talk of the economy and focusing only on foreign affairs. The GOP is this dense.
Insanity.