US Debt

[LouisXIV]

Here is an interesting video to help explain just how much the USA is in debt.

[fumobici]

Or instead of listening to an unqualified grifting motivational speaker trying his hand at macroeconomics by using the household budget analogy which doesn't apply when the debtor owns a printing press that can create sovereign currency but sounds rational to the economically illiterate, you can listen to an actual Nobel Prize winning economist address the same topic:

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html

I'd personally rate than Krugman is even too alarmist about the debt. Here's another Nobel Prize winning economist offering more rational views on debt and the American economy in the plain language of the non-economist:

finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/joseph-stiglitz-simple-4-step-plan-solving-america-120134116.html;_ylt=ApgO0_piB5btWZ4ROVmAPoC7YWsA;_ylu=X3oDMTE2YTVyYTF1BHBvcwMxMgRzZWMDdG9wU3RvcmllcwRzbGsDam9zZXBoc3RpZ2xp?sec=topStories&pos=9&asset=&ccode=


Stiglitz gets to the 'debt crisis' at about 3:30 in the video.

Austerity is designed to protect the wealth of the ultra rich and banking class held in USD, and to force the gutting of the federal government for purely ideological reasons in classic Norquist/John Birch Society style- which is why the Republicans won't actually propose spending cuts, they want to force a crisis that will cripple the government to advance their neo-liberal agenda.

The two biggest drivers of profligate American spending are obviously the so-called 'defense' and 'security' budgets, combined well over a trillion USD per year and carrying health care costs that massively higher than other industrialized countries pay on a per capita basis imposed by a system designed to protect the hugely profitable and parasitic insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Tony Robbins is probably the last person one should listen to to get a rational analysis of economic reality- he's essentially a slick talking entertainer lacking any credentials on macroeconomic theory.

[LouisXIV]

I agree that Tony Robbins may not have the background or project the image of being qualified on the subject, but at least he is saying something in terms that can be understood.

President Obama is a Nobel Prize winner also and has nothing in his past to qualify him for the prize. Makes me wonder if the Nobel Prize committee was qualified to give Obama that prize it also makes me wonder if Krugman is really qualified.

Krugman, is one of the "kick can down the road" people who feel that things will get better in the future to solve the problem. Just like a couple years ago when the Federal Reserve, turned on the printing presses and dumped $800 BIllion of worthless money on the market in hopes of kick starting the economy. All this does is create inflation and inflation is just a hidden tax on the people. Look what has happened to the price of energy since. The people who sell us the oil want more dollars because our dollar is not worth as much. And it is the people who pay because of these poor decisions by the government. Government manipulation, business greed and the average American's ignorance of their government and their own personal financial matters is the cause of the problems we have today.

We are currently paying almost a half trillion dollars a year on interest on the national debt and is projected to be a trillion by the year 2020. That is a trillion dollars each year that has to come from somewhere. If we had no debt that would be a trillion dollars each hear we could spend on something of value. Krugman seems to feel that the average American debt situation if not comparable to our national debt problem. He is very wrong. All the wizards of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have done is make our financial situation so complicated that no one even wants to try to figure out what is the truth.

When Clinton was president one of his appointments at the Security and Exchange warned him of the potential problem with the credit default swaps and derivatives that were unregulated. The Treasury Secretary and Greenspan felt there should be no concern and Greenspan felt that the markets can "police themselves". At that time there were 27 trillion of these in the market place and when the whole thing caved in in around 2008 there were over 150 trillion dollars of these so called investments. Prior to this a lot of Wall Street sales people went around the world and sold this garbage. Greece and Italy we big buyers, no wonder they have problems now and along with many other poor decisions by these governments and many more in this world. There are also a whole lot of people on Wall Street that should be having their afternoon tea with Bernie Madoff.

Joseph Stiglitz’s Simple, 4-Step Plan to Solving America’s Debt Crisis is way to little and way to late. Yes what we spend on defense is to much, and many other areas of our government spend way to much, but that is nothing compared to what is spent on Social Security, Medicare and the new health care program that will put us even deeper in debt. It is these programs are the reason we have to borrow another trillion or more each year with no intent of paying back the principle. As long as I can remember they have been predicting problems with Social Security, but the government has done nothing about it. Our politicians have put their head in the sand in the hopes that the problem will go away. If the politicians do attempt to solve the problem they surely will not get re-elected. Decades ago they should have raised the retirement age and made other changes. Medicare has many problems that should be corrected before creating a whole new program that will even cost us more. Our defense budget is nothing compared to these two items.

Americans has created a monster that eats cash for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And to tell the truth the rest of the world is doing the same.

[fumobici]

May 8, 2012 13:56:28 GMT LouisXIV said:

I agree that Tony Robbins may not have the background or project the image of being qualified on the subject, but at least he is saying something in terms that can be understood.

President Obama is a Nobel Prize winner also and has nothing in his past to qualify him for the prize. Makes me wonder if the Nobel Prize committee was qualified to give Obama that prize it also makes me wonder if Krugman is really qualified.

I agree the Nobel committee had no business bestowing a Peace Prize on Obama. Based on what, a couple of pretty speeches? He has certainly done little retrospectively to make the decision look rational. The prizes in the academic disciplines though are based on more rigorous criteria. You don't win a Nobel in the sciences on making pretty speeches in a political campaign.

Krugman, is one of the "kick can down the road" people who feel that things will get better in the future to solve the problem. Just like a couple years ago when the Federal Reserve, turned on the printing presses and dumped $800 BIllion of worthless money on the market in hopes of kick starting the economy. All this does is create inflation and inflation is just a hidden tax on the people. Look what has happened to the price of energy since. The people who sell us the oil want more dollars because our dollar is not worth as much. And it is the people who pay because of these poor decisions by the government. Government manipulation, business greed and the average American's ignorance of their government and their own personal financial matters is the cause of the problems we have today.

We are currently paying almost a half trillion dollars a year on interest on the national debt and is projected to be a trillion by the year 2020. That is a trillion dollars each year that has to come from somewhere. If we had no debt that would be a trillion dollars each hear we could spend on something of value. Krugman seems to feel that the average American debt situation if not comparable to our national debt problem. He is very wrong. All the wizards of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have done is make our financial situation so complicated that no one even wants to try to figure out what is the truth.

Most of the debt is held by Americans in the form of bonds and T-bills, so even though the cost is a parasitic drag on the government, contrary to popular perception most of the money stays here rather than going to China and is cycled back into the domestic economy. The wizards of Wall St. are in fact one of the primary causes of the current account balance deficit because they, often through outright fraud- see William Black for details- cratered the economy thus eviscerating the revenue side. Unfortunately those "wizards" own both parties and are thus seemingly immune from accountability for their incredibly irresponsible and criminal misbehavior.

When Clinton was president one of his appointments at the Security and Exchange warned him of the potential problem with the credit default swaps and derivatives that were unregulated. The Treasury Secretary and Greenspan felt there should be no concern and Greenspan felt that the markets can "police themselves". At that time there were 27 trillion of these in the market place and when the whole thing caved in in around 2008 there were over 150 trillion dollars of these so called investments. Prior to this a lot of Wall Street sales people went around the world and sold this garbage. Greece and Italy we big buyers, no wonder they have problems now and along with many other poor decisions by these governments and many more in this world. There are also a whole lot of people on Wall Street that should be having their afternoon tea with Bernie Madoff.

That is substantially true, and much of the blame lies with Clinton who participated in dismantling long standing regulations like the 1932 Glass–Steagall Act wisely put in place after the Great Depression to prevent just the sort of quasi-speculative criminality that occurred. Of course the Democrats and Republicans both by and large went right along with the travesty, having been well compensated for doing so.

Joseph Stiglitz’s Simple, 4-Step Plan to Solving America’s Debt Crisis is way to little and way to late. Yes what we spend on defense is to much, and many other areas of our government spend way to much, but that is nothing compared to what is spent on Social Security, Medicare and the new health care program that will put us even deeper in debt. It is these programs are the reason we have to borrow another trillion or more each year with no intent of paying back the principle. As long as I can remember they have been predicting problems with Social Security, but the government has done nothing about it. Our politicians have put their head in the sand in the hopes that the problem will go away. If the politicians do attempt to solve the problem they surely will not get re-elected. Decades ago they should have raised the retirement age and made other changes. Medicare has many problems that should be corrected before creating a whole new program that will even cost us more. Our defense budget is nothing compared to these two items.

Medicare actually points the way to a solution to much of the 'debt crisis' being a popular iteration of the single-payer concept in use in the rest of the industrialized world. Without Medicare, we'd see even worse disparities between American health care costs and world rates. Of course much of the potential savings were squandered by the influence of Big Pharma making sure Americans pay massively higher costs for medications than the rest of the world. Medicare should have been allowed to negotiate drug prices, but this was scuppered by Big Pharma during the legislative process to protect them from market pricing.

As for Social Security driving the debt, that's just nonsense. SS is fully funded by payments made by American workers and designed to be financed separately from the general funding stream. This has of course been gamed by politicians in bad ways but this is no fault of SS or a reflection of any inherent flaw in the system. Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans naturally cannot leave that separation alone and have jointly comingled the revenue streams for political reasons, plus deliberately underfunding SS through Payroll Tax cuts. This is bipartisan too, both parties share equal blame- as they do in much of what's wrong. SS is being jeopardized by cynical politicians counting on an uneducated electorate's not seeing what they're up to.

Americans has created a monster that eats cash for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And to tell the truth the rest of the world is doing the same.

Yes, but that cash being "eaten" doesn't just disappear- you don't see historically high inflation rates or significant USD devaluation, which would what you'd see if it was. In fact the "missing" money is going to investors, mostly American financial institutions, but also to foreign ones and governments such as China and Japan as well. The reason the "crisis" isn't addressed is thus very simple: it is incredibly profitable for very influential and wealthy interests who just happen to fund the campaigns of both major US parties. The American government for example lends huge multinational banks hundreds of billions at virtually zero interest. Those banks and financial institutions take that "free money" and lend it at astronomical profit. It's really just corruption pure and simple; they buy the politicians and the parties, who in turn write and implement laws that steal money from taxpayers to give to the same people who spend billions lobbying and bribing them with campaign money. We really, really, really need to outlaw corporate lobbying and go to public campaign financing to fix this systemic corruption.

[LouisXIV]

"We really, really, really need to outlaw corporate lobbying and go to public campaign financing to fix this systemic corruption." I totally agree with the lobbying, but I am not sure about public campain financing, but I do feel it has merit. I would would also like to see some election reform. Like NO campaining until a month before the election. Primary elections on the same day all over the country and the presidential election about two months after. If there is public campaign money it should be a minimal amount.

People with the "academic disciplines" scare me, I would rather see people who are in touch with reality. Also term limits. No full time, professional congressmen or senators.

[fumobici]

Rather than financing campaigns using public money, perhaps instead the broadcast media could be required as part of their FCC licensing requirements to provide free prime time airtime to candidates to promote their positions and debate in lieu of profitably selling airtime to the highest bidder. I'm sure they- along with the moneyed interests who purchase airtime- would strenuously object but I'd welcome them to relocate to a place with no bothersome governmental regulations to impede them- a libertarian paradise like Somalia seems perfect.

The problem that still leaves unsolved is corporate speech in the form of the 'issue ads' generally attacking a candidate that pretend to be separate from political campaigns but that carpet bomb the airwaves during election run-ups. As long as deep pocketed special interest groups can propagandize using the public airwaves with no restrictions, you cannot have fair elections.

[Deleted]

In France, presidential candidates are limited to a ceiling of 13.7 million euros for the first round and an additional 18.3 million euros for the 2 candidates who make it to the second round.

After verification of the accounts, I think that anybody who got more than 5% of the votes receives a reimbursement of 50%.

Of course the fact that paid political ads and billboards are forbidden greatly reduces the expense, compared to a country like the United States.

However, there is close scrutiny of the cost of rallies.