It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt

[SigSense]

I found this quote from the article to be disturbing: "According to the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government, which is an official United States government report, the total liabilities of the United States government, including future social security and medicare payments that the U.S. government is already committed to pay out, now exceed 65 TRILLION dollars. This amount is more than the entire GDP of the whole world."


It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt

 

[360]

US DEBT CLOCK

 

[jeremy]

SURPRISE!!!

 

[nawainwright]

shocked, SHOCKED I say....okay, maybe not that shocked

 

[SKSnut]

I found this quote from the article to be disturbing: "According to the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government, which is an official United States government report, the total liabilities of the United States government, including future social security and medicare payments that the U.S. government is already committed to pay out, now exceed 65 TRILLION dollars. This amount is more than the entire GDP of the whole world."


It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt

i kinda figured that already. So now what the hell are we gonna do?

 

[LEaSH]

Control+Alt+Delete

 

[John Galt]

That is only if you actually believe what the US government is telling us! I have seen reports that it is actually higher than that when you consider Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all of the government pensions (growing like a weed as we speak), not to mention the liabilities of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FDIC, IMF, UN, and World Bank committments. Given our current debt, financial obligations, entitlement-bred mentality of so many sheep and the fact that more and more people are becoming dependent/addicted to government money, we are truly at a crossroads. If we want to leave ANYTHING that offers ANY hope for our children, NOW is the time for the next Revolution. I honestly believe that things can possibly get so bad within the next 10 years that I pray that we change our government with ballots, as opposed to bullets. I pray for peace, but I am ready for either.

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." - Declaration of Independence

 

[rambone]

 

[Jack Ryan]

I found this quote from the article to be disturbing: "According to the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government, which is an official United States government report, the total liabilities of the United States government, including future social security and medicare payments that the U.S. government is already committed to pay out, now exceed 65 TRILLION dollars. This amount is more than the entire GDP of the whole world."


It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt

It's not a problem at all. Easy to fix it. We just elect the next Bush to the white house and the Republicans will go back to explaining how debt is no big deal and it's good for the country to spend more money than we have. Every one should have a nice tax cut support a new war and quit worrrying about it. There will be a democrat along soon after. Not to fix anything but so the republicans will have a stooge to blame.

 

[antsi]

I'm about as fanatical a debt hawk as there is, but this article paints a worse picture than reality. We do have options.

In particular, they are projecting future debt based on 1) continuing to pay the exact same scheme of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid benefits that we're paying now, and 2) health care costs continuing to rise at the current rate (far in excess of inflation). Most of the debt they project hasn't happened yet, and will only happen IF these two assumptions hold.

In other words, for this to happen, we have to keep racing toward the cliff exactly the same way we are right now, with no corrections or changes. It is certainly possible that we will keep on doing the same dumb things we're doing now, but it's not inevitable.

Actually, I think we will have a major economic crash long before these projected debts actually occur. By analogy, consider a family with an income of $50K/year, who is $75K in debt and adding $15K of debt per year. Sure, you can project out and say that after 61 more years they'll be a million dollars in debt (actually it would be a lot sooner than that due to the accumulating debt service burden). But in fact they probably won't actually get to $1M because their creditors will pull out the rug long before that.

I think that's what's going to happen to us in the not too distant future. Investors are going to look at our fiscal behavior and say, "this is a bad bet; I'm not putting my money in US Treasuries or any other dollar denominated asset." If people stop buying T-bills, Uncle Sam's checks will start bouncing and the whole edifice will come crumbling down.

Actually it would not take any extreme measures to reverse this trend. We could start means testing for SS and Medicare/aid, raise the retirement age, trim the benefits, and make the whole thing a lot closer to sustainability.

All we really lack is the political willpower to actually do this. I said the corrections wouldn't have to be "extreme" and by any rational standard, that's true. However, any mention of cutting even one dime out of SS/Medicare/aid causes a huge voter backlash that politicians cannot tolerate.

If we as voters do not change our responses, then yes, the doomsday scenarios will come to pass. But if, IF, we were to suddenly start screaming even louder and more bloody murder about the deficits, and politicians came to believe that Deficit Bingeing was an even more guaranteed political death than tweaking the Sacred Entitlement Cows, then they'd respond.

Right now, they' won't do what's necessary because they're afraid of voter backlash. All we need to do to fix this is create an even more vicious voter backlash against political creatures who pile up debt.

 

[Militarypol21]

My :

Either, 1: Everything will work out in the end or 2: The US is screwed and there is no recovery. Regardless, sitting here saying this needs to be done, or that should have been done isn't going to make a bit of difference in either of those two scenarios. What happened has happened and now it's just a waiting game. Hopefully sooner or later our government will open their eyes and stop wasting billions of dollars helping all these **** pour countries and help ourselves for once. I believe when the time comes, if you have millions saved away in shoeboxes under your bed and a gun at every window, yourself and your family are now on the top of the food chain as others like myself thank god we made it through another day.

I for one am going to kick back, open a beer, and wait for 2012 to get underway.

 

[antsi]

What happened has happened and now it's just a waiting game.

I disagree. What we do politically over the next couple of election cycles could make all the difference in the world. Or we can stay on this path.

Debt is a problem that builds on itself. It's still fixable now, but the problem is picking up momentum and if we wait much longer to make changes it will be too late.

 

[jsgolfman]

Technically speaking, there is no debt. The money never existed in the first place. We tell the Fed to print $100B, they magically create a "debt" in the system for $100B, but that debt was created out of the same thing the money was.....thin air.

 

[gund]

The U.S. government does not issue U.S. currency - the Federal Reserve does.
The Federal Reserve is a private bank owned and operated for profit by a very powerful group of elite international bankers.

Oh come on. Any profit the federal reserve makes is returned to the government. They just did it.

Sure the whole system is balooney and unsustainable, but lets not make it sound worse than it is.

 

[tenring]

Everywhere and everyone is saying that the cost of medical care is rising all the time, but no one, and no where have I read just what is causing the cost to rise. Just what are the details?

 

[Libertarian01]

To All,

In Allen County every year for the past six (6) years we have done a debt protest on April 15th.

At the debt protest we simply hand out a brief history of the national debt and interest payments on that debt.

As of today, Sunday, 7 Feb 10 the national debt is: $12 Trillion $346 Billion $427 Million and change. I get this information directly from the United States Treasury.

To date this fiscal year we have paid $164,248,228,365.53 in interest payments alone. Remember that our fiscal year started last October, so these payments include October 09, Nov 09, Dec 09 and Jan 10. We won't have February's interest payment until a couple of days into Feb.

Do NOT confuse the debt with unfunded liabilities!!!

The debt is money we owe on and have borrowed right now, today, this minute! We have borrowed $12 Trillion+ in money from a variety of sources. Most of that money we owe to public investors and intragovernmental holdings. I am not going to go into much detail here but debt held by the public will include every treasury bond owed to every single 401K, 403B (that's me), mutual fund, and personally bought treasury bonds. Intragovernmental holdings includes money borrowed from other US Government areas, such as money borrowed from the Social Security Administration.

Unfunded liabilities are those future payouts that we are going to have to pay that we do not have money set aside for. An example of this would be direct Social Security payments, Medicare payments, military pensions, Medicare party D and so on.

We have an estimated $70 Trillion to $500 Trillion in unfunded liabilities!!! This number can be played with in so many different ways and by so many different organizations that no one can nail this number down exactly. I won't even try to do so here.

I don't mean to be depressing dear reader but... NONE of these numbers includes ANY of the debt held by every single State in the Union, every County in Every State, every city or municipal government in every county! Indiana is NOT allowed by our Constitution to run a fiscal debt (thanks to monies lost on the canals) HOWEVER if you don't think Indiana gets around this by using directed bond issuance's for specific items, think again.

Should anyone want to join us on April 15th for our little protest at the Allen County Post office you are more than welcome. I ask everyone to dress in a suit & tie or at least business casual. We simply greet people and hand out a history of the debt as of about April 13th (I need time to work on it and print it).

Please take the time to go to the US Treasury and review our debt.

Debt to the Penny (Daily History Search Application)

If you are too happy or too carefree this can counter that horrible feeling and make you quite depressed. Or angry. Or sad. Or bummed.

This is what we, today, are leaving our children and our childrens children.

Regards,

Doug

 

[dhnorris]

Look at the positive side if hyperinflation does occur the last $96,000 on my mortgage should go pretty quick if that's a day's wages

 

[indykid]

Look at the positive side if hyperinflation does occur the last $96,000 on my mortgage should go pretty quick if that's a day's wages

That is assuming wages go up. My company hasn't handed out raises in over 4 years, even though profits have been pretty good.

I agree that having an old debt should be easier to pay off if our pay would keep up with inflation.

 

[Raoc]

Paying off the debt was never a part of the plan. All just small steps on the way to global socialist utopia.

 

[ocsdor]

My :

Hopefully sooner or later our government will open their eyes and stop wasting billions of dollars helping all these **** poor countries and help ourselves for once.

I believe there was a presidential candidate in 2008 who held the same opinion. He was an old, fiesty, yet very honest guy who, for some reason, the MSM labeled as crazy and all the kool-aid drinking sheep (both Rep & Dem) believed the always-deceitful MSM and didn't vote for him. Too bad.