How big is the U.S. Debt?
 

May be slightly outdated but:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-w-8...layer_embedded


Instead of listening to the warnings of our founding fathers, now we are in debt hell....
#1 The Obama administration is now projecting that the federal budget deficit for this year will be an all-time record $1.645 trillion dollars.
#2 The budget deficit for this year alone will end up being well over 10 percent of GDP. That is an absolutely nightmarish level.
#3 Currently, the accumulated national debt of the U.S. government has reached a grand total of $14,123,589,307,190.53.
#4 If you divided the national debt up equally among all U.S. households, each one would owe a staggering $125,475.18.
#5 The federal government has borrowed 29,660 more dollars per household since Barack Obama signed the economic stimulus law two years ago.
#6 During Barack Obama's first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
#7 In the new budget that the Obama administration has proposed, the U.S. government would spend 3.7 trillion dollars in 2012 and by 2021 the U.S. government would be spending a whopping 5.6 trillion dollars per year.
#8 The U.S. government currently has to borrow approximately 41 cents of every single dollar that it spends.
#9 The total compensation that the federal government workforce earned last year came to a grand total of approximately 447 billion dollars.
#10 The U.S. national debt is currently rising by well over 4 billion dollars every single day.
#11 The U.S. government is borrowing over 2 million more dollars every single minute.
#12 The U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.
#13 Unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are estimated to be well over $100 trillion, and nobody in the U.S. government seems to have any idea how we are actually even going to come close to meeting all of those obligations.
#14 If you were alive when Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
#15 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.




http://endoftheamericandream.com/wp-...Chart_2010.gif




SOURCE

Someone please explain to me how can one country have more debt than the GDP of the entire world. Economic wise, not political

By making living on tic a way of life and delaying the start for paying back of debts to the next administration.

Or in other words: by biting off more than one can swallow.

Problem is the shortsightedness of people, which in our species seems to be by genetic design.

The US is not alone in the debt-making business, though. It just is the biggest, most dependent and effectinbg others as well offender. In %, Britain and Japan are much worse off.

Germany was on the way to a truly balanced fiscal budget some years ago, but then came the global crisis and next the bailing out of European mismasnagement that turned the currency union into an effective transfer union. Calculations done by government-indepedent fiscal analysist and economic experts show that the Merkel government in this and the past two years have set the course for the future fiscal ruin of Germany by still sticking with bailouts for the Euro crisis - no matter the cost.

The Socialists would not do it even better, but would sink even more money and make even more debts for social issues to buy voters' sympathy - ahte cost of destroying the future. And that is true for America as well. It makes no sense to now bash only Obama, when you see that since WWII governments of both parties set sails for always increasing debts. That starts with the stupidicty of American stimulaus policy (what I cut short by calling it "living on tic"), and ends with the unaffordably high military budgets. The simple truth is that by its own economic and fiscal potency the US in no way can finance the military giant sytructure it is running. It depends on others pumping money into America, and by that indirectly into the US military as well.

Needless to say that such madness cannot work for always. The longer it has lasted, the tougher will be the crash, the harder will be the wake-up call. And many ordinary people will be left at the sideline. It already has started.

America is stupid, and Europe is stupid. Both are stupid in different ways and interpretations of this effort of being stupid, but stupid they are both nevertheless.

Money as Debt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArfPy...eature=related

Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM5...eature=related

Basically dont worry about it if you dont have power to change it, just be prepared for when it all comes tumbling down.

Better start stockpilling guns, ammo and gold

Add to that 60 trillion owed in medicare alone to those that have paid in, plus another 10 trillion in SS, that's more money in all the bank and stockmarkets in the world...

Course most of us know the facts, we'll never see either if you're under 50.
Oh, you'll still pay into it of course.

I remember the panic and finger-pointing when the overall National Debt hit one trillion dollars. Now the annual budget deficit is more than that.

Amazing.

I wonder where it will all end. I mean, you can't just eliminate that level of debt, not without cutting just about everything and anything that moves and the public just won't let you do that, either that or the opposition will block it any way they can.

This dilemma does remind one of Thomas Jefferson's famous quote on the issue of slavery; "we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

That reminds me of another quote, "If you're riding a tiger, it's hard to get off."

We can not clear our own deficit on top of our debt but ours is nothing to what you guys have. :o

Thank god we have rich people, let's just tax them.

I say we put on our pirate hats and visit soro's bank account.:arrgh!:

2 wars (that were the most expensive per troop ever) and then an economy that needed saving what else do you expect?

but it really shows you what happened. Clinton had it leveled out. that lasted long didn't it?

Curious... what happens if a country like the US is just unable to pay its debt? :hmmm:

When an aircraft at high altitude runs out of fuel, there are only two options, both of wich result in the same outcome.

Either you refuse to accept your status, try to hold altitude no matter what, by that you become slow, air finally stops flowing over the wings, you stall and fall down in an uncontrolled way, nose first.

Or you start looking for a place to conduct a controlled emergency landing, start to glide, trading altitude for sufficient speed to prevent stall, and that way go down - but hopefully without crashing, but doing a rough landing.

But anyway - down your way goes, this or that way, in both cases. America's current belief that it just can carry on like it always did, and that the old familiar ways will keep the plane in ther air, are illusory this time. It is a major turning point in American (and global) history, the end of a taken-for-granted part of American self-description. American optimism will not pull the car out of the mug this time, like it did so moften before. I do not have the impression that much of America already has fully realised the full historic dimension of this turning point. America will either fundamentally change - or break.

What current politicians in America do is to pull the stick to the max to not lose altitude, and making the people believe that one can keep altitude and speed with empty tanks by just imagining that there will be a magical in-flight fuel-up by magical fairy-tanker-flight 001 who does not even charge you for the costs of the magical fuel.

The AOA is becoming steeper and steeper, and the airspeed drops and drops further. Guess how that stunt necessarily must end.

One does not need to have a academical degree in economics in order to forsee the future. And economics is no science anyway.

TLDR - It's Starfighter time.

I get that whole analogy and what not and I know what the government is doing in regards to this... however my main question is what happens when this plane smashes into the ground? Besides everyone blaming the Lolwaffles.

A massive mass-expropriation by hyperfinflation.

Breakdown of even the basic communal and social security systems.

Rich nations having been wise to disconnect from the dollar early using the opportunity to claim dominant key positions in the rubble that was and will be again the American economy. Massive shifting of property rights for this economy from America to foreign nations, namely Chinba, and maybe even rich oil Arab nations, Brasil, India.

Repeation of what has been seen in Argentinia, and in euriope in the past centuries. Practically all dominant european nations have gone bancrupt at least once in their past 500 years of history. It resultet always in loss of military dominance, and always was caused ba overstretched military biudgets and war budgets.

A m iulitary, an empire that tries to expand faster than it naturally grows, and spends more than it can produce in wealth by itself, and lives and militarily spends beyond what it can afford, is build on sand. Or it lives as long as there is still some rich new land to conquer and plunder, like a virus consumes an organism. But once the organism is consumed up and dies, so does the virus.

Mass unemployment, exploding poverty, more poorer people, fewer richer people. Cuts in education spending, health, culture. Loss sof global dominant status.

A tremendous immediate power transfer to the Chinese.

A struggling Europe.

A desintegration of transatlantic ties as a result.

Block-building in Asia. And I mean very strong block-building, dominated by the new superpower, China. Europe will financially collapse, and thenm the Union, or the carricature of a union that it is, will desintegrate. I do not rule out new wars and national civil wars in Europe. Not in the next future, but the medium and long term. I expect these European wars not to be fought on the latest hightech level, at least not generally - because nations probabaly will not be able to maintain huge hightech armies for international wars, and civil wars will see at least on of the two sides not having wide access to the nation's hightech armouries.

Many of these single symptoms already have started. It is hard to line out a single linear, causal reaction chain between them. Instead, much happens simultaneously.

Much of it also is a vicious circle that feeds back on its self-dynamic. From one point on, there is no more safe return. And I think that point already has been passed.

It's like a helicopter in a vortex. The more cyclic you apply, the faster you go down.

Certain is just one thing: the rich elites will have better chances to deal with the blow, than the middle class and the poor class. The latter will get caught by the lion's share of the blow.

I also see chance for an alternative scenario which I like even less. And that is that the US turns into a totalitarian and/or military dictatorship. Such a regime most likely will be an extremely isolationistic one, with closed gates in its city walls, and maintaining many hostilities with the world's nation around.

All in all I think we already are beyond Europe's climax. From now on, by trend things will go down - sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Europe's future will be decided - not in Europe. America's fall will hurt it tremendously, and the future reign will be negotiated between the Chinese and the Muslim sphere of power - the one acting with economics, the other with ideology.

Two uncertainties difficult top be assessed here, are these: the consequences and reaction to of the Chinese one-child-policy which is leading to an overaging population there, too, and the success or failure of the Arab states to compensate for the loss of oil reserves by annecting major positions of influence in European industry and hightech corporations. On the first, we have no influence, on the latter we must realise that having Arab inverstors in our key economic companies and big corprorations, is not in our longterm interests, but leaves us defenceless in the future to come.

I hope I'm not being an ******* by saying this, but:


Give the government any kind of money and they will spend it on *cigarettes and beer. To hell with paying the power bill for the month.


* Some countries can still afford to pay for their weapons (and other assorted worthless bull**** items). Other countries have to reign it in a bit to keep their workforce from starving to death.

Nothing ever really changes in human history. :-?