Posted on 09/28/2022 6:37:27 AM PDT by Heartlander
The United States of America is over $30 trillion in debt, give or take some hundreds of billions of dollars.
As shown by the U.S. National Debt Clock, that means that every citizen is in debt for approximately $92,000. The debt per actual taxpayer is about $245,000. Click on the National Debt Clock site, and prepare to have your eyeballs hurt as you watch the numbers racing upward in real time. For a different but equally painful take, go to the U.S. Treasury Data Lab’s “Visualizing Federal Government Debt.” The information is a bit older, but each of those 28,429 dots you see represents a billion dollars.
The debt clock does show that the net worth of 22 million Americans is now more than a million dollars. This sounds impressive until you factor in inflation and housing costs. Today, houses sell for a median price of $428,700, but went for $165,300 only 20 years ago. Meanwhile, roughly 40 million Americans are living on food stamps and in poverty.
Want to see a sight nearly as startling as the National Debt Clock? Click on the site “A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies,” then tap on a few of the alphabetized letters. That ocean of agencies you see is a major reason the debt clock is spinning away.
For years, our federal government has blown through more money than we can ever pay back, and it keeps right on borrowing and spending. Our federal officials, elected and otherwise, are like the folks who keep getting and using new credit cards to pay off other maxed-out credit cards. The difference between the two is that those individuals will sooner or later find themselves out of resources with their credit flatter than a new dollar bill while the government just keeps on printing out bogus bucks by the barrel.
Which brings us to this question: What do we have to show for it? What tangible objects have we gained from these massive expenditures?
Stellar public schools? A superb health care system? A New Athens on a shining hill? Nope, nope, and nope.
Well, then, how about our armed forces? The Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the world, and the United States spends more on national defense than the next nine nations on the list, including China and Russia, combined. Surely we get our buck’s worth here.
Then again…maybe not. The recent withdrawal from Afghanistan was one of the most humiliating debacles in our nation’s history, and some of our military leaders these days seem more interested in teaching critical theory and political correctness than preparing for war, a combination of circumstances that may explain why America’s trust in the capabilities of its armed services has fallen precipitously in recent years.
Here’s a much worse example of outrageous government spending that will contribute little to the lives of ordinary Americans: the cunningly-named Inflation Reduction Act. You can read the short summary of this bill here. The Inflation Reduction Act with its hundreds of billions of dollars in spending does nothing to cut inflation. Mostly, it is a “climate crisis” bill, throwing money that doesn’t exist at problems that don’t exist, like clean manufacturing and “cleaning up pollution and taking steps to reduce environmental injustice with $60 billion for environmental justice.” It also promises to add thousands of new IRS agents to the government payroll, an odd way at best of tackling inflation.
Words like budget, cutbacks, and thrift are as rare these days in Washington D.C. as humility and common sense. Unfortunately, it is “we the people” who will bear the burden for this borrowing and debt that brings neither gains nor benefits.
Of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill once said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Of our current debt, we might stick a different twist into that line: “Never in human history was so much owed by so many for so little.”
But people are smugly unaware of the debt bomb ticking.
When it explodes, it will worse than Russian nukes hitting United States. Voters keep voting for the big spenders because they bring home the bacon.
This is why the dollar MUST collapse.
The fiat dollar, and all that is involved with it - IRS, FED, fractional-reserve bankstering and all the banksters that run it have run their course.
A switch to a new currency (think PM-backed) will of necessity wipe out in an instant the $30T+ debt. Not a dime will be paid back in principle or interest; for that matter, all along we’ve not been paying any principle, only interest. That’s why it is so diabolical.
There is plenty to show for it. The people running the debt scam have plenty to show for it. Thousands of unproductive people have paychecks to show for it. It is wealth transfer and there are many many winners and even more losers.
We do have something to show for it, a criminal ruling class that took it all.
Something showing up for it - the inflation!
It would zppear that those who we have entrustdd to manage our money as a nation are mismanaging it. Can we fire them? (Rhettorical)
Well, we have that war torn shathole Ukraine. Helluva deal for some fake democracy spreading.
The author is nuts. There’s plenty to show for it. Virtually every federal politician becomes a multi-millionaire upon arrival in DC despite an unimpressive government salary.
If, as has been suggested, this debt is owed in large part to China, why not just tell them to go die? They can live without it.
Au contraire mi Amigo.......
We are here
The “defense” industry is richer. They are the real winners of the war in Afghanistan.
We have plenty to show for our national debt. None of it is good.
It’s all part of the plan. And it is proceeding very well.
That is why the Swamp is so intent on Inflating the dollar!
Inflate their way out of debt.
They do it EVERY TIME, and the people with actual retirement savings (me) get SCREWED IN THE A$$%!
But THEY DO NOT CARE, because we will be dead and gone before they can be punished for their malfeasance!........................
I generally try to seem open-minded but this does not seem believable to me in the slightest. It sounds like somebody's pipe dream.
Is there actually substance to any of this?
Sure it may have been expensive, but we have all those government programs that solved our social problems.
> Inflate their way out of debt. <
Yep. That is the only way out. But the politicians will bungle even that as they will continue to borrow at the higher rates inflation causes.
So maybe there is no way out.
Totally agree.
We’re in a mess and fiddling with little economic levers can’t get us out. We need to start over.
People say “you can’t do that”. But we have $30T in debt. Can we pay that off? No. That’s the real “you can’t do that”. So we need to bite the bullet and re-invent our system. The pain is inevitable, no matter what.
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