A Record Debt!

^---  The widget above shows us crossing the $124,000 line per taxpayer of federal government debt.  It was not too long ago when I put that widget up when we were at $119,000. (OK, yes, this debt widget shows slightly different numbers than the "Official Debt", but the difference is tiny).  We now owe more than 100% of our GNP!  This is usually the level when "SJGR".  Bad things happen at these (and marching ever higher) levels of debt

Do YOU feel more able to pony $5000 MORE as your "share"?  Are you happy about it?

The answer is: HELL NO!


The psychopaths running our .gov and our financial system have foisted over $5000 more per taxpayer just since Fringe Blogger Bearing started his blog!

---

OK, let me put away the emotion for a moment.  Let us explore what is possible to do in order to resolve it.  There are three ways that could be done to bring down our debt:

1)  Cut spending and/or raise taxes to put us into a surplus, that money would then be used to pay down the debt.  But, we already know how likely that is, in one of my probability classes I learned what zero probability was.  There is a 0% probability that this will happen.  They may raise taxes, but they will NEVER cut spending, not under the R Team (Ron Paul now has no chance of winning the nomination) and nor (especially) the D Team.

2)  Formal default of our debt is another way.  Our Treasury debt (the $124,000 per taxpayer) is held both US investors (individuals, banks, insurance companies, etc.) as well as foreign (China and Japan for example).  In the past, Reinhart & Rogoff (This Time Is Different) have shown us that defaulting on either (or both) the local and domestic debts has happened many times.  Two variations of this is partial default ("haircuts") and debt re-scheduling (putting the debt off further into the future).

3)  Defaulting via inflation, in which our Treasury and the Fed could just print the money, and so the value of the US dollar would decline in real terms, and the debt would then be easier to pay off in more abundant dollars that are worth less then before.  This is tricky to do though.  There are BIG losers in inflation, and if they do it wrong, BIGGER LOSERS in hyperinflation.  History provides many examples of this kind of default as well.

To my knowledge, the above three ways of paying down the debt (or in combination) are the ONLY ways of doing it!  How are we going to do that?  NO ONE (of importance) is seriously talking about this.  Lending more evidence that we are run by a psychopathic system that is completely irresponsible, out of control and led by people of very low quality...

This will not end well.  Most of you already know that.

When the widget shows us $125,000 per taxpayer, in some 5 - 6 weeks from now, although it does seem to be happening a little faster now (that would be known as "exponential growth", a topic I will write about soon), I will re-visit this whole sham of our national debt.

And Europe, on the whole, is probably a little further down this awful road than we are.

And, of course, I have not even addressed the other debts (debts incurred by states like California, credit card debt, onerous student loan debt and so on and so on) that are crippling our Middle Class, our financial system and our entire way of life.