House is not serious about spending.

Maybe you can help me out.....what gives the Feds the right to ANY state land?

BTW, your chart refers to “financial assets” ~ I was referring to land, thorium, uranium, gold, silver, platinum, copper, coal, oil, gas ~ all the extractives available on vast stretches of public lands.

What does? Well, several things ~ one of them PRECEDENT.

As you undoubtedly recall the 13 colonies were turned into 13 sovereign nations by the Treaty of Paris. They, in turn, wrote up the Articles of Confederation and one of the deals they all adhered to was they CONTRIBUTED their UNORGANIZED TERRITORIES and CLAIMS to the United States of America.

The largest such territory was called The Northwest Territory. It was subsequently turned into all or parts of states called New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota ~

One of my ancestors handled the sales transactions for virtually all of the public lands in Indiana ~ for the most part that land had been given as grants to important or famous people (George Rogers Clark, the Lees, etc.) or in patents to individual soldiers and contributors to the American Revolution. They had their pick of federal lands.

In the early days the issue you are trying to raise simply did not concern anyone. There was more than enough land for everybody, and as new states came into the Union the public lands were sold to new settlers ~ with the money reverting to the federal government.

The last of the public lands were sold in Indiana in the Early 1900s ~ a very swampy area known as the Limberlost. It actually had to be drained before anyone could figure out what they owned.

Later on other territories were accreted to the United States and that land was divided up and organized as states and the federal government sold lots of land to new settlers.

There was never any doubt in the minds of the founders or two or three generations after them that when the United States acquired vast tracts of land it belonged to the United States and not to any particular state.

States were thought of as being sovereign beings, with authority over private individuals and their needs for civil government.

In the course of time states began to be entered into the union with specific assignments of land ~

That's where you are coming in ~ New Mexico was assigned specific land, as was Utah, Arizona, Nevada ~ and all the rest was retained by the United States until such time as some use could be found for it.

I've flown over some of that nasty stuff ~ the volcanic flats (traps), the sand deserts, the wicked exposed rocks where you would die in hours.

Uncle Sam got STUCK WITH THAT STUFF.

A full 1/3 of the land in the United States is STILL OWNED by the US government. They didn't buy it or acquire it from citizens (for the most part). If it gets organized and placed in private hands it will become subject to the state jurisdiction appropriate to it.

We might even get a Navajo State out in the Four Corners area some day ~ who knows.

Now, to a specific answer ~ the Founders gave the Federal Government the right to unorganized territories acquired by the United States. The constitution gives the Federal Government authority over the erection or creation of new states ~ they are POLITICAL ENTITIES that incidentally operate within certain geographic regions. The dirt isn't really "the state" ~ that's part of this country.

Sorry my error from 100 to 100,000.

So it begs the next question...if Uncle Sam has such huge assets as you are implying, why are the rating services about to downgrade Treasury debt?

Thank you very much! Now I feel like I should have known that, but alas, I didn’t. I assumed (not good) that once a state came into being, the state acquired all the land within it’s borders.

At least Texas owns most of it’s land. :)

To heck with the "balanced budget amendment" - I want the Thomas Jefferson Amendment

Why?

Funny you should ask.

It's political street theatre!

Now, for the relevance of S&P, NO ONE uses them as a reference for purchasing US securities ~ maybe your company's securities, but not that of this country. Just doesn't happen.

My only point was that after another round of CRISIS HYSTERIA, if the bill that is eventually signed does not meet the guidelines laid out by these ratings houses and we do not get downgraded, then, as you said WRT to our vast resources, we were taken for suckers once again.

Now, as I understand it, a downgrade would issue in an immediate interest rate increase and this increase would by itself increase our debt. So you would think that if our Congress were REALLY worried, i.e. Reid and other such members of mainly the Senate, they would not even think of passing something that did not meet those guidelines. Therefore, since they are moving in the direction of a non-starter of a bill, that must mean that they never were really worried about a downgrade or at least not worried about the effects of a downgrade.

Reid, et al, are NOT WORRIED because the ratings scores issued by a publisher don't mean all that much when it comes to the power and majesty of the United States government.

We put our bonds on the market and people buy them ~ if they don't buy them at one interest rate, that'll be reset to another one (through established bid mechanisms) and we'll try again.

That's how nation-states do the trick.

Some nation-states are small enough, and not well known enough that they can be dealt with like a large company. For instance, you and I might not have enough information about Azerbaijan to know if their bond offerings at 5% are any good, or will we get clipped. S&P may have studied them and come up with a well educated guess. However, if you had France issuing bonds at 2%, everybody knows (who has sufficient money to buy billions of Euros in bonds) whether or not France is going to pay off.

It's not like the USA is a corner grocery.

Obama wants the money. Reid wants to bully around the House. The TEA Party wants Obama to cut the cost of government PDQ.

In reality the United States does not need to restrict its borrowing to situations where it pledges it's FULL FAITH AND CREDIT. We have vast lands and resources owned by the federal government that can be PLEDGED ~ or MORTGAGED.

Greece was going to sell some government owned islands and the SHTF but we have thousands of mountains to sell, and it's not like someone is going to move a mountain somewhere else!

In reality the United States does not need to restrict its borrowing to situations where it pledges it's FULL FAITH AND CREDIT. We have vast lands and resources owned by the federal government that can be PLEDGED ~ or MORTGAGED.

Right. So we were suckered and everyone in DC KNOWS the American people, sitting glued to the TV or radio watching all of this, were being suckered.